The Cloud Talks to the Cloud: AWS Interconnect and the Multicloud Connectivity Shift

For most of the past decade, connecting workloads across multiple cloud providers meant managing VPN tunnels, colocation arrangements, and third-party network fabrics, a DIY exercise that consumed networking resources and slowed down cross-cloud adoption. With the general availability of AWS Interconnect, announced on April 13, 2026, AWS has made a decisive architectural statement: multicloud connectivity should be as straightforward to provision as any other managed AWS service. This is not an incremental feature addition. It is a shift in how cloud providers think about interoperability.

What AWS Interconnect Is

AWS Interconnect is a managed connectivity service with two capabilities. AWS Interconnect – multicloud provides a private, managed Layer 3 connection between Amazon VPCs and VPCs on other cloud providers. Traffic flows entirely over the AWS global backbone and the partner cloud’s private network; it never traverses the public internet, delivering predictable latency and consistent throughput without any physical infrastructure for your team to manage.

AWS Interconnect
The last-mile service introduced alongside the GA announcement applies the same managed provisioning model to connect branch offices, data centers, and remote locations to AWS via participating network providers. It supports bandwidth from 1 Gbps to 100 Gbps, includes a 99.99% availability SLA up to the Direct Connect port, and allows bandwidth to be adjusted from the console without reprovisioning.

Security, Resiliency, and Provisioning

Security is built in by default. Every connection uses IEEE 802.1AE MACsec encryption on the physical links between AWS routers and the partner cloud’s routers at the interconnection facilities; no separate configuration is required. Each cloud provider manages encryption independently on its own backbone, so organizations with strict compliance requirements should review the specific encryption documentation for their deployment.

Resiliency is also built into each connection that spans multiple logical links distributed across at least two physical facilities, so a single device or building failure does not interrupt connectivity. For monitoring, AWS Interconnect – multicloud integrates with Amazon CloudWatch, including a Network Synthetic Monitor per connection to track round-trip latency, packet loss, and bandwidth utilization.

Provisioning takes minutes. You select a cloud provider, source and destination regions, and desired bandwidth in the AWS Direct Connect console, then provide your Google Cloud project ID. AWS generates an activation key to complete the connection on the partner side. Routes propagate automatically in both directions.

Availability and Partner Roadmap

At GA, AWS Interconnect – multicloud is live in five region pairs with Google Cloud: US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Europe (London), and Europe (Frankfurt). Microsoft Azure support is coming later in 2026, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has been announced as a future partner.

The open API specification published on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license means any cloud provider can adopt it by meeting AWS operational requirements. For AWS Interconnect – last mile, Lumen is the initial partner in US East (N. Virginia), with AT&T and Megaport in progress. AWS also offers one free local 500 Mbps interconnect per region starting in May 2026.

Scaling with Transit Gateway and Cloud WAN

For organizations with multiple VPCs in a single region, AWS Transit Gateway provides a centralized routing hub; a single Interconnect attachment connects to Transit Gateway, which handles routing to all attached VPCs. For global deployments spanning multiple AWS Regions and partner cloud environments, AWS Cloud WAN extends this model worldwide with centralized policy management and segment-based routing. These reference architectures are what make AWS Interconnect genuinely viable for large enterprises with complex multi-region, multi-cloud footprints.

What This Means for Cloud Strategy

AWS Interconnect signals a permanent change in what cloud providers consider their responsibility. The provisioning, resiliency, encryption, and monitoring of cross-cloud connectivity are now platform-level concerns, not customer-side configuration problems. At CloudThat, the multicloud connectivity challenge surfaces consistently across enterprises, not as a strategic disagreement, but as a practical operational barrier. AWS Interconnect removes a significant part of that friction. The more pressing question now shifts to governance: how organizations manage IAM policies, observability, and security posture consistently across clouds once the network is no longer the limiting constraint.

Future of Multicloud Networking

AWS Interconnect – multicloud is one of the more consequential AWS networking announcements in recent years. Private, managed, MACsec-encrypted, redundant cross-cloud connectivity, provisioned in minutes from the AWS console and scalable through Transit Gateway and Cloud WAN, is now a first-class AWS service. With Google Cloud live across five region pairs, Azure on the roadmap, and an open specification available for other providers, the trajectory is clear: multicloud connectivity is moving from a DIY challenge to a platform-managed capability. For teams evaluating their cross-cloud strategy, this is the right moment to revisit what is now operationally feasible.