VPC Peering vs Transit Gateway

~10 min read

Two ways to connect multiple VPCs — direct point-to-point versus a central routing hub.

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Key points

  • VPC Peering: point-to-point, no transitive routing, no hourly cost, simple for a handful of VPCs
  • Transit Gateway: central hub, transitive routing across all attachments, hourly + data cost, scales to dozens of VPCs and on-premises connections
  • Peering connections needed for a full mesh grow quadratically with VPC count — the practical trigger to switch to Transit Gateway
  • Transit Gateway route tables give fine-grained control over which attached networks can reach which others