Direct TLS can speed up your connections

The trigger for this discovery was the public Preview of Aurora DSQL at re:Invent 2024. Before the public release, access to DSQL had been restricted, requiring developers to be on the corporate VPN. Developers started to interact with DSQL off-VPN, and realized it was slower - way slower - than before. What could possibly explain this? Clearly, it’s “the network” since that’s the only difference. That doesn’t mean the office WiFi is slow - otherwise connections would always be slow, instead of just off-VPN connections. But something about the office WiFi was adding significant overhead. As it turns out, the office has three networks: Both a WiFi and wired network for Amazon employees A WiFi network for guests One of my teammates did the following tests: Network type slow Employee WiFi yes Employee wired yes Guest WiFi no So… there’s something specific happening only on the corporate network. After doing some server-side debugging, the team noticed something strange. For every c ... Read full article.