Overview

Customers of Appian Cloud can use AWS PrivateLink to enable secure communication between their Appian Cloud instances and AWS resources hosted on their private networks. PrivateLink can be used to integrate with customer-owned services such as business data sources or authentication systems through a customer's AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). PrivateLink can also be used to expose an Appian Cloud instance to a customer managed VPC.

This integration option is an alternative to VPN Tunnels for customers who have IT infrastructure running on AWS.

Benefits

PrivateLink connectivity gives customers several benefits, including, but not limited to:

• Enhanced security: Traffic over PrivateLink is kept within the AWS network and does not traverse the public Internet.
• Simplified access to customer resources: Appian Cloud instances with multiple application servers (e.g. High-Availability) can use a single PrivateLink connection regardless of the number of nodes. Furthermore, upon request, Appian Cloud instances owned by the same customer (e.g. development, test, staging) can share the same PrivateLink connection to access customer resources.
• Reduced network configuration complexity: PrivateLink removes the need to rely on allowing a public IP on customer edge firewalls. Additionally, customers will not face conflicts with Appian's private network IP address spaces since connections through PrivateLink are performed through an endpoint service.

Access customer resources using AWS PrivateLink

This integration option allows an Appian Cloud instance to communicate with resources inside a customer managed VPC, where the operation is initiated by the Appian Cloud instance. For example, the Appian Cloud instance querying an RDBMS hosted in the customer VPC.

In this configuration, Appian Cloud acts as the service consumer and the customer VPC as the service provider. See Access a Customer VPC using AWS PrivateLink for more details.

Access an Appian Cloud instance from an AWS VPC

This integration option allows resources within a customer VPC to communicate directly with an Appian Cloud instance. For example, data management tools hosted in the customer VPC querying the business database hosted on the Appian Cloud instance using Enhanced Data Pipeline.

In this configuration, the Appian Cloud instance is the service provider and the customer VPC is the service consumer. See Access an Appian Cloud instance using AWS PrivateLink for more details.