This article discusses leveraging AWS PrivateLink for secure and cost-effective cross-region connectivity to Datadog. It highlights how PrivateLink addresses challenges in distributed system monitoring by enabling private, low-latency data transmission, improving both security posture and operational efficiency. The approach minimizes data egress costs and simplifies network architecture for hybrid and multi-region deployments.
Read original on Datadog BlogWhen operating distributed systems across multiple AWS regions, securely and efficiently collecting observability data can be a significant challenge. Traditional methods often involve routing data over the public internet or through complex VPN tunnels, introducing security risks, higher latency, and increased data transfer costs. AWS PrivateLink offers a robust solution by establishing private endpoints, ensuring data remains within the AWS network.
For global applications, monitoring solutions like Datadog need access to metrics, logs, and traces from various regions. Without PrivateLink, sending this data across regions typically incurs charges for inter-region data transfer (egress) and may expose sensitive telemetry to the public internet. This can lead to compliance issues, performance bottlenecks, and unpredictable costs, especially for high-volume data streams.
AWS PrivateLink provides a private and direct network connection between your Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) and services like Datadog, without requiring an internet gateway, NAT device, VPN connection, or AWS Direct Connect. This architecture enhances security by keeping all traffic within the AWS network and can reduce data transfer costs by avoiding internet egress charges for cross-region traffic when connected through specific service endpoints.
Architectural Benefit: Reduced Attack Surface
By using PrivateLink, the attack surface for observability data is significantly reduced. Data travels over AWS's private network, eliminating the need for public IP addresses or firewall rules to allow inbound internet traffic to monitoring agents, thus aligning with zero-trust network principles.
The article highlights support for cross-region PrivateLink within Datadog's US1 and AP1 regions. This means that an application running in, for example, us-east-1 can send its observability data to a Datadog endpoint hosted in another region (e.g., us-west-2, or ap-southeast-1) via PrivateLink. This pattern simplifies multi-region deployments and centralizes monitoring while maintaining network isolation and security. The data flow remains private, encrypted, and within the AWS backbone, offering a more robust and compliant solution than public internet routes.