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When connecting an customer gateway to a VPC VPN, what hardware or software is providing the service on Amazon's side?

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Have you tried asking Amazon? – gekkz Feb 8 at 11:39
A ticket is open with them. – Tom Paine Feb 8 at 13:43
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Yeah - unless someone on this site 1) works for Amazon and 2) is willing to tell you, none of us can know. Additionally, if they answer "FooBlaz 2000", they could switch that out next week and the answer will then be wrong. – mfinni Feb 8 at 14:33
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closed as off topic by DJ Pon3, joeqwerty, sam, sysadmin1138♦ Feb 9 at 19:12

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2 Answers

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That should be none of your concerns actually ;)

I'm not trying to be mean here, but in a proper Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) you should only need to know respective contracts/interfaces/protocols to obey, alongside some Service-level Agreement (SLA) eventually.

In addition, Amazon is notoriously secretive about the actual hardware in use, e.g. many have speculated about this regarding the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and they have never specified it in other than comparative terms, e.g. their EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) is defined as:

EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) – One EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor.

You might try to deduce the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) hardware accordingly via the information in Customer Gateway Devices We've Tested and the respective Requirements for Your Customer Gateway, which is the closest indication available I think. Further, you might want to have a look at A Detailed View of the Customer Gateway and an Example Configuration, which includes an architecture diagram.

Most notably, Amazon VPC requires support for establishing Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) peerings:

BGP is used to exchange routes between the customer gateway and virtual private gateway. All BGP traffic is encrypted and transmitted via the IPsec Security Association. BGP is required for both gateways to exchange the IP prefixes reachable via the IPsec SA.

Unfortunately BGP is not implemented in many consumer-level VPN devices, thus requires respective professional hardware or software VPN appliances.

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up vote 0 down vote accepted

I asked in a premium support ticket.

Their response was that the policy was not to disclose the information and, regardless, that the support department was not privy to all of the technical details - the VPC knowledge is kept by the VPC team.

Anecdotally, they suggested it was currently (as of Q1 2012) high-end branded gear/software rather than anything bespoke.

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