What is the difference between a Customer Gateway and Router

Question

Customer Gateway

A customer gateway is the anchor on your side of that connection. It can be a physical or software appliance.

Customers can connect multiple customer gateways (CGW) to a single VPC virtual private gateway (VGW) or can connect a single router to multiple VPC VGWs.

Is there a difference between a router and customer gateway? From AWS faq section https://aws.amazon.com/vpc/faqs/#C9, it seems they are one and the same.

Answer 1

A Customer Gateway is the generic name describing a device that can speak IPSec and terminate the tunnels.

It could be a router, it could be a Linux server, but perhaps the most commonly used device is a hardware firewall device from a vendor like Cisco, Juniper, Sonicwall, etc.

Some routers can serve the purpose, but many routers do not have the capability of performing all of the things a customer gateway needs to do.

The section called Your Customer Gateway is written from the perspective of explaining this device to a technical person responsible for implementing one.

Your company has decided to use an optional Amazon VPC VPN connection that links your data center (or network) to your Amazon VPC virtual private cloud (VPC). A customer gateway is the anchor on your side of that connection. It can be a physical or software appliance.

It explains the necessary requirements in high-level, yet technical terms.