Question

Difficulty: MediumOptimizing Network Performance and Latency

A financial services company hosts a high-frequency transactional application in the us-east-1 region. The application components are distributed across two VPCs: a transaction processing VPC and a ledger database VPC. The VPCs are currently interconnected using an AWS Transit Gateway. During high-volume trading hours, the network latency between the transaction processing application and the ledger database increases, leading to transaction timeouts. The database replication requires maximum throughput and the lowest possible latency. Which network architecture modification will optimize the network performance and reduce latency for this inter-VPC traffic?

  1. Establish a VPC Peering connection directly between the transaction processing VPC and the ledger database VPC, and update the route tables to route database traffic via the peering connection.Answer
  2. B
    Configure a Direct Connect Gateway to route the inter-VPC traffic transitively over a dedicated private virtual interface to bypass the Transit Gateway.
  3. C
    Route the inter-VPC replication traffic through a single NAT Gateway deployed in a public subnet of the transaction processing VPC to egress to the public internet.
  4. D
    Create a Route 53 Private Hosted Zone for the ledger database and associate it with both VPCs to enable optimized endpoint routing.

Answer

Establish a direct VPC Peering connection between the two VPCs and route the database traffic through it.
VPC Peering establishes a direct relationship between two VPCs. Because it does not pass through an intermediate gateway or router instance (like AWS Transit Gateway), it offers lower latency and has no aggregate bandwidth limits, making it the most performant choice for high-throughput database replication.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the current connectivity model and performance bottlenecks.
The current model uses AWS Transit Gateway, which introduces an extra network hop (adding latency) and has bandwidth limits of 50 Gbps per Availability Zone attachment.
Understanding the limits of the current architecture explains why latency increases during peak traffic hours.
2
Compare alternative VPC-to-VPC connectivity options.
VPC Peering provides a direct connection path with no bandwidth limits and lower latency since it does not pass through an intermediate gateway device.
Direct VPC Peering is the optimal solution for low-latency, high-throughput requirements between two specific VPCs.
3
Update route tables to redirect the database traffic.
Traffic between the transaction processing VPC and the ledger database VPC is routed directly over the peering connection instead of going through the Transit Gateway.
Updating route tables ensures that only the relevant traffic is optimized while leaving other traffic on the Transit Gateway if desired.

Key Concept

VPC Peering provides lower latency and higher bandwidth compared to Transit Gateway because it routes traffic directly on the AWS network fabric without gateway processing overhead.
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