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Networking Fundamentals · Intermediate

East-West Traffic

Traffic that moves laterally between servers, workloads or devices within a data center or network.

Definition

Virtualization, microservices and distributed storage make east-west traffic the majority in modern data centers. Spine-and-leaf designs and microsegmentation address its performance and security needs.

Example

An application server querying a database server in the same data center generates east-west traffic.

Exam tip

Lateral movement by attackers is east-west, which is why internal segmentation matters.

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