In the traditional data center design, inter-subnet forwarding is provided by a centralized router, where traffic traverses across the network to a centralized routing node and back again to its final destination. In a large multi-tenant data center environment this operational model can lead to inefficient use of bandwidth and sub-optimal forwarding.

EVPN MPLS VPWS (RFC 8214) provides the ability to forward customer traffic to / from a given attachment circuit (AC) without any MAC lookup / learning. The basic advantage of VPWS over an L2 EVPN is the reduced control plane signalling due to not exchanging MAC address information. In contrast to LDP pseudowires, EVPN MPLS VPWS uses BGP for signalling. Port based and VLAN based services are supported.

Flexible cross-connect service is an extension of EVPN MPLS Virtual Private Wire Service (VPWS) (RFC 8214). It allows for multiplexing multiple attachment circuits across different Ethernet Segments and physical interfaces into a single EVPN VPWS service tunnel while still providing single-active and all-active multi-homing.