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Best Practices to Optimize Failover Times for Overlay Tunnels on AWS Direct Connect

Networking & Content Delivery Blog



This article provides comprehensive guidance on optimizing failover times for overlay tunnels on AWS Direct Connect, focusing on reducing network downtime and improving connectivity reliability.

  • Key optimization strategies include:
    • Reducing BGP hold and keepalive timers
    • Enabling Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD)
    • Comparing pinned vs. unpinned tunnel configurations
  • BFD can reduce failover times by 90%, from 3 seconds to 300 milliseconds
  • Unpinned tunnel configurations offer faster failover compared to pinned tunnels
  • Recommended approach: Use unpinned tunnels with BFD for optimal performance

The article emphasizes the importance of careful implementation, hardware compatibility, and incremental testing to achieve optimal network resilience in hybrid cloud environments.



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