Some Express Connect partners have already connected their networks to the access points of Alibaba Cloud. You can choose Express Connect partners if your data center is located outside the access point locations of Alibaba Cloud or your workloads do not demand high bandwidth. An Express Connect partner can create a hosted connection over an installed Express Connect circuit from your data center to a virtual private cloud (VPC) on Alibaba Cloud.
Background information
- An Express Connect circuit installed by an Express Connect partner is shared by multiple tenants.
- Shared Express Connect circuits provided by Express Connect partners are already connected
to the access points of Alibaba Cloud. You need only to connect your data center to
the access point of an Express Connect partner. Therefore, shared Express Connect
circuits are best suited for users that demand time efficiency.
In most cases, when you use a shared Express Connect circuit to connect to Alibaba Cloud, the installation can be completed within one month, while installing a dedicated Express Connect circuit is more time-consuming.
- Alibaba Cloud offers shared ports. Express Connect partners can create shared ports
instead of virtual border routers (VBRs) for tenants to manage their hosted connections.
Shared ports belong to tenants.
Changes brought by shared ports:
- Express Connect partners are no longer charged initial installation fees, VBR fees, and resource usage fees.
- Tenants are charged resource usage fees and outbound data transfer fees.
For more information about the billing of shared Express Connect circuits, see Billing of hosted connections over Express Connect circuits.
- After an Express Connect partner creates a shared port for a tenant, the tenant must accept the shared port. Then, the tenant can create a VBR for the shared port. Each shared port can be associated only with one VBR.
- Express Connect partners isolate resources based on the virtual local area network (VLAN) IDs of resources. Therefore, each hosted connection is assigned a VLAN ID. After you create a shared port for a tenant, you must notify the tenant to accept the shared port. Then, the tenant can create a VBR that uses the specified VLAN ID for the shared port. The tenant is not allowed to change the VLAN ID of the VBR.
Connect to Alibaba Cloud by using a shared Express Connect circuit
The following figure shows the workflow of connecting to Alibaba Cloud by using a shared Express Connect circuit.
- If this is the first time you use a shared Express Connect circuit, you and the Express
Connect partner must complete the tasks in the following figure to establish a connection
between your data center and Alibaba Cloud.
- If your data center is already connected to Alibaba Cloud by using a shared Express
Connect circuit, the Express Connect partner must create a shared port for your existing
connection and you must accept the shared port. The following figure shows the workflow.
Note Your service is not interrupted in this process.
Express Connect partners
The following table describes the Express Connect partners of Alibaba Cloud. You can choose an Express Connect partner to set up a hybrid cloud environment between your data center and Alibaba Cloud.
| Express Connect partner | Hong Kong (China) | Tokyo | Singapore | Australia | Frankfurt | UK | Virginia | San Jose | Ashburn | Indonesia | India | Malaysia |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Interxion | - | - | - | - | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| BT | - | - | ✔ | - | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| PCCW Global | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | - | - | ✔ | ✔ | - | - | - |
| Indonet | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | ✔ | - | - |
| TATA | ✔ | - | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | ✔ | - |
| SingTel | - | - | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| NextDC | - | - | - | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| OBS | ✔ | - | - | - | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| RETN | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Telin | - | - | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | ✔ | - | - |
| Colt | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Equinix | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | - | - | ✔ | ✔ | - | - | - |
| Megaport | ✔ | - | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | - | - | ✔ | ✔ | - | - | - |
| Epsilon | ✔ | - | ✔ | - | - | - | - | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | - | - |
| Reliance Communications (RCOM) (the parent company of GCX) | - | - | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Intercloud SAS | - | - | ✔ | - | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Vodafone | - | - | - | - | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| DE-CIX | - | - | - | - | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Verizon | ✔ | - | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| HGC | ✔ | - | ✔ | - | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| AT&T | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | ✔ | ✔ | - | - | - |
| GTT | - | - | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| China Unicom (Hong Kong) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| China Unicom (Europe) | - | - | - | - | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| China Telecom Global | ✔ | - | - | - | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| euNetworks | - | - | - | - | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| E-Shelter | - | - | - | - | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| CHIEF Telecom | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| 5G Networks | - | - | - | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| HK Boardband | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Avelacom | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| SBC-RouterX | - | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| SBKK | - | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| China Mobile International (CMI) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | - | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | - | - | ✔ | - | - |
| TIME dotCom | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | ✔ |
Example
Your data center is located in Equinix DC11 in Virginia, USA. Your colocation provider is Equinix. You want to use Equinix Cloud Exchange (ECX) to connect your data center to the access point of Alibaba Cloud in the US (Virginia) region. In addition, you want to use a cloud service to connect to resources such as Elastic Compute Service (ECS), Object Storage Service (OSS), Relational Database Service (RDS), and Server Load Balancer (SLB) instances in the China (Beijing) region.
