Question

Difficulty: HardHybrid and Multi-Account Network Connectivity Design

An enterprise is designing a multi-Region, multi-account hybrid network architecture for its AWS Organizations environment. The workload consists of 4040 production spoke VPCs in the `us-east-1` Region and 2020 development spoke VPCs in the `us-west-2` Region. The architecture must satisfy the following requirements:

* Outbound internet traffic from all spoke VPCs in both Regions must be routed through centralized NAT Gateways to minimize costs. A failure of a NAT Gateway in one Availability Zone (AZ) must not impact outbound traffic from other AZs.
* Hybrid connectivity to the on-premises network (172.16.0.0/12172.16.0.0/12) must use a dedicated 10 Gbps10\text{ Gbps} AWS Direct Connect (DX) connection in `us-east-1` as the primary path. A backup AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection in `us-east-1` must be used only if the DX connection fails.
* All spoke VPCs in both Regions must resolve private DNS queries for resources in a Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) named `corp.internal` hosted in a centralized Shared Services account.

Which of the following architectures meets these requirements while ensuring high availability, minimizing costs, and preventing asymmetric routing?

  1. A
    Deploy a Transit Gateway (TGW) in each Region (`tgw-east` and `tgw-west`) and establish a peering attachment between them. Deploy a centralized Egress VPC in each Region, each containing a NAT Gateway in each AZ. Configure the spoke VPC route tables to route internet-bound traffic to their local TGW and then to the local Egress VPC. Associate `tgw-east` with the DXGW. Establish the backup Site-to-Site VPN on `tgw-east`. Advertise the 172.16.0.0/12172.16.0.0/12 prefix over both BGP sessions. On the customer gateway, prepend the local autonomous system (AS) path multiple times on the Direct Connect BGP session to ensure it is preferred over the VPN. Associate the `corp.internal` PHZ with the Shared Services VPC, and rely on TGW Peering to transitively resolve DNS queries for all spoke VPCs without individual VPC associations.
  2. Deploy a Transit Gateway (TGW) in each Region (`tgw-east` and `tgw-west`) and establish a peering attachment between them. Deploy a centralized Egress VPC in each Region, each containing a NAT Gateway in each AZ. Configure the spoke VPC route tables to route internet-bound traffic (`0.0.0.0/0`) to their local TGW, which routes it to the local Egress VPC. In the Egress VPC, route traffic from each subnet to the NAT Gateway in the same AZ. Associate `tgw-east` with a Direct Connect Gateway (DXGW) connected to the DX connection. Establish the backup Site-to-Site VPN terminating on `tgw-east`. Advertise the 172.16.0.0/12172.16.0.0/12 prefix over both BGP sessions, and configure the customer gateway to assign a higher Local Preference to routes received via the DX connection. Authorize and associate the `corp.internal` Private Hosted Zone in the Shared Services account with all spoke VPCs in both Regions.Answer
  3. C
    Deploy a Transit Gateway (TGW) in each Region and peer them. Deploy a single centralized Egress VPC in `us-east-1` with one NAT Gateway. Route all internet-bound traffic from both Regions to `tgw-east` and then to the Egress VPC. Configure the backup Site-to-Site VPN to advertise a more specific prefix (172.16.0.0/13172.16.0.0/13) than the Direct Connect connection (172.16.0.0/12172.16.0.0/12) to ensure the VPN is preferred for backup routing. Create Route 53 Resolver inbound and outbound endpoints in each spoke VPC to forward queries for `corp.internal` to the Shared Services account.
  4. D
    Connect all spoke VPCs in both Regions directly to the DXGW to enable transitive VPC-to-VPC routing. Deploy a centralized Egress VPC in `us-east-1` with a NAT Gateway in each AZ, routing all internet traffic from both Regions to this VPC via the DXGW. Establish the backup VPN on the DXGW, and advertise the 172.16.0.0/12172.16.0.0/12 prefix over both BGP sessions. In the Shared Services account, share the `corp.internal` zone via AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) to all accounts, and associate it locally.

Answer

The architecture that uses Regional Transit Gateways, local Egress VPCs with multi-AZ NAT Gateways, equal prefix BGP routing with Local Preference, and direct multi-account Private Hosted Zone association.
The correct architecture uses Regional Transit Gateways with peered connections and local Egress VPCs to comply with TGW routing rules and avoid inter-Region NAT charges. Deploying a NAT Gateway in each AZ prevents cross-AZ dependencies and ensures high availability. Using the same prefix (172.16.0.0/12172.16.0.0/12) over both BGP sessions allows standard path selection, and assigning a higher Local Preference on the customer gateway for Direct Connect routes ensures inbound traffic prefers Direct Connect. For outbound traffic, AWS naturally prefers Direct Connect over VPN for equal prefix lengths. Finally, authorizing and associating the Private Hosted Zone directly with all spoke VPCs across accounts and Regions provides a cost-effective and highly available DNS resolution mechanism.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Deploy Transit Gateways in both Regions and peer them, and deploy local Egress VPCs in each Region with a NAT Gateway in each AZ.
Ensures scalable multi-account VPC routing and high availability for internet egress while avoiding single points of failure and cross-AZ charges.
TGW Peering does not support cross-Region transitive routing to a single Region's NAT Gateways efficiently, and a single NAT Gateway is a single point of failure.
2
Configure BGP routing on the customer gateway to advertise the same 172.16.0.0/12172.16.0.0/12 prefix on both Direct Connect and VPN connections, and set a higher BGP Local Preference on the customer gateway for routes received over Direct Connect.
Symmetric routing is achieved where both inbound and outbound traffic prefer the Direct Connect connection under normal operations.
Equal prefix lengths prevent longest prefix match overrides. Prepending the AS path or using different prefixes on the VPN would cause asymmetric routing or incorrect failover.
3
Authorize the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone in the Shared Services account and associate it with all spoke VPCs in both Regions.
Enables seamless and cost-effective private DNS resolution across all accounts and Regions.
PHZs must be explicitly associated with each VPC to resolve queries; transitive DNS resolution over VPC or TGW peering does not happen automatically.

Key Concept

Design of resilient, multi-region hybrid networks using Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, VPN failover routing, and cross-account Private Hosted Zone associations.
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