Direct Connect isn't required from a cost perspective - ingress into AWS is free in all cases I can think of, but certainly in the case of S3 [0]. DX is useful

Direct Connect isn't required from a cost perspective - ingress into AWS is free in all cases I can think of, but certainly in the case of S3 [0]. DX is useful when customers need assurances of bandwidth/throughput, or if they want to avoid their traffic routing over the internet. [0] "You pay for all bandwidth into and out of Amazon S3, except for the following: Data transferred in from the internet..." - https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/