North-South Traffic is network traffic that flows between a data center and external networks, such as clients on the internet, remote users, or other sites. It passes through edge devices like border leaves, routers, firewalls, and load balancers. Distinguishing it from east-west traffic helps architects size external links, security inspection, and gateway capacity separately from internal fabric bandwidth.
Category: Network & Connectivity · Subcategory: Data Center Network Architecture · Part of the AIDC Technical Terminology reference.