A practical guide to connecting rural and remote sites to AWS

This article provides a practical guide for state and local government agencies in rural or less-connected areas to establish resilient connectivity to AWS for production workloads.

• Three transport patterns: multiple terrestrial ISPs on diverse paths, one terrestrial with cellular/satellite backup, or fully wireless with no terrestrial connection
• LEO satellite constellations offer 20-60ms latency, making them practical for interactive workloads unlike legacy geostationary satellites
• Two access patterns: direct HTTPS for browser/API access, or AWS Site-to-Site VPN with multi-connection resilience for private network connectivity
• Path diversity is critical—multiple ISPs sharing the same conduit create false diversity and single points of failure
• Use CloudFront and Global Accelerator to improve performance for geographically distant sites
• BGP dynamic routing automates failover across multiple VPN tunnels during transport disruptions

By matching transport patterns to available connectivity options and access patterns to workload requirements, agencies can build highly resilient AWS architectures regardless of physical location.