Quick Connect Overview

PacketFabric Quick Connect is an instant layer 3 connectivity service between service providers and clients on the PacketFabric platform.

How it works

Quick Connect allows you to exchange routes between Cloud Routers, providing one-click layer 3 connectivity to a service provider’s network. It uses the PacketFabric Cloud Router as a distributed virtual routing service to provide connectivity over PacketFabric’s NaaS platform.

When a client uses Quick Connect to connect with a service provider’s Cloud Router, they are actually importing the service provider’s routes into their existing Cloud Router connections. All route configuration happens automatically on your behalf.

Cloud Router Quick Connect illustration

Quick Connect exports and imports routes between a service provider and a client.

Service provider
The service provider creates the Quick Connect service to offer to their customers. This service is composed of IP routes to a dedicated access port in a colocation facility or to a public cloud provider.
These routes are the provider routes, and are exported from one or more connections from the service provider Cloud Router.
Client
The client imports the service provider routes into one or more Cloud Router connections.
The client also provides a public prefix for the return routes, which tells the service provider where to direct the return traffic.

Service providers

Our providers currently include:

Features

Quick Connect includes all the features and functionality of a PacketFabric Cloud Router. See Requirements and Feature Support.

This includes ingress SNAT and DNAT to support public IP addressing for imported/exported routes. It also includes monitoring and route visibility.

Benefits

Quick Connect enables private, high speed, and secure connectivity between any service provider on the PacketFabric platform and their clients.

Service provider benefits

  • A fully automated direct connect offering without any software development or capital costs, and which requires minimal management. This leads to faster revenue generation.
  • No extra charges to become a service provider beyond the standard charges for a Cloud Router and its connections.
  • Service providers can independently add more capabilities like adding more prefixes, or more regions, or more bandwidth.
  • Quick and easy setup and management.

Client benefits

  • No need to invest in an intensive routing infrastructure.
  • Reduced public cloud egress data costs.
  • Improved application performance and data transfer performance by taking advantage of the lowest latency routing.
  • Extra security by taking potentially sensitive data off the public internet.
  • Connectivity between providers with no need to hairpin connectivity, and thereby reducing latency and complexity.
  • Quick and easy setup and management.

Basic process

Clients:

  1. Create a Cloud Router.

  2. Create connections on the Cloud Router.

  3. Configure ingress SNAT on those connections.

    Note that NAT is not available for IPsec VPN connections, but you can still import routes as long as you are able to provide a public IP address to use for the return traffic.

  4. Add the Quick Connect service to one or more connections. In doing so, you must provide a public IP prefix for directing return traffic.

  5. Once accepted by the service provider, you can begin exchanging traffic with the Quick Connect service provider.

For more information, see Add Quick Connect to a Cloud Router Connection.

Service providers:

  1. Create a Cloud Router.
  2. Create connections on the Cloud Router.
  3. Configure DNAT on those connections.
  4. Use the marketplace to create and publish a Quick Connect service. Once published, the service is available for clients to use.
  5. Once a Quick Connect request is received from the client, the service provider is responsible for accepting or rejecting the request.

For more information, see Set Up a Quick Connect Marketplace Service.

Updated on 16 May 2023