A networking service that enables private connectivity between cloud resources and services without exposing traffic to the public internet. Like having a private tunnel between two buildings instead of walking through a busy street, Private Link creates secure, low-latency connections that stay within the cloud provider's backbone network. AWS offers PrivateLink, Azure provides Private Link, GCP has Private Service Connect, and OCI offers Private Endpoints.
A financial services company uses AWS PrivateLink to access an S3 bucket containing sensitive customer data from their VPC. Traffic never traverses the public internet, meeting their regulatory requirement for data-in-transit security and reducing exposure to potential network-based attacks.
All major cloud providers offer private connectivity services that keep traffic within the provider backbone, avoiding public internet exposure.