Connecting Clouds Without the Complexity: AWS Interconnect – Multicloud

Enterprises rarely run on a single cloud anymore. A team might use AWS for core compute and storage, while another relies on a specialized service on Google Cloud or Azure. Connecting these environments has traditionally meant coordinating VPN tunnels, negotiating colocation space, and manually configuring third-party network fabrics, work that consumes networking teams without adding direct business value. On April 14, 2026, AWS announced general availability of AWS Interconnect – multicloud, a managed connectivity service that establishes private, high-speed connections between an Amazon VPC and VPCs on other cloud providers, removing most of that manual overhead.

What the Service Does

At its core, the service establishes a dedicated Layer 3 network path that links your AWS environment to a supported cloud provider, keeping cross-cloud traffic entirely off the public internet.

• Connections are available today with Google Cloud, with Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) support planned later in 2026.
• Data stays on managed infrastructure the whole way, AWS’s backbone on one end, the partner’s private network on the other, which is what makes latency and throughput predictable instead of subject to internet congestion.
• Every connection is encrypted by default using IEEE 802.1AE MACsec at the interconnection facilities; no manual encryption setup is required, though each provider manages encryption on its own backbone independently.
• There’s no single point of failure by design; each connection is made up of several logical links spread across two or more separate facilities, so losing one device or one building won’t take your connectivity down with it.
• Amazon CloudWatch integration is included, with a Network Synthetic Monitor tracking latency, packet loss, and bandwidth utilization.

How It Works

Provisioning happens from the AWS Direct Connect console. You select AWS Interconnect, choose a cloud provider, pick your source and destination regions, specify bandwidth, and provide your project ID on the partner side. AWS then generates an activation key that you use on the partner cloud’s console or CLI to complete the connection.

On the Google Cloud side, this currently means creating a network connectivity transport with the activation key and peering it to your VPC via the gcloud CLI, since there is no console option for that step yet. Once peering is active, you add a route in your AWS VPC route table to the partner’s IP range via your Virtual Private Gateway, and the two networks can exchange traffic within minutes. Routes propagate automatically, and the interconnect attaches to a Direct Connect Gateway, which connects to a Virtual Private Gateway, Transit Gateway, or AWS Cloud WAN deployment depending on your network design.

Things to Keep in Mind

A few configuration details matter when setting this up:

• Plan your addressing ahead of time; the CIDR blocks on your AWS and partner-cloud VPCs need to be distinct, since any overlap will break routing between them.
• You must choose IPv4, IPv6, or dual-stack, and that choice must match on both sides.
• The Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) must match between the two VPCs; AWS and Google Cloud use different default MTU values, and a mismatch can cause fragmentation or silent data loss.
• Pricing is a flat hourly rate based on the bandwidth tier and varies by region pair; routing through AWS Cloud WAN’s any-to-any model can also affect the total cost, since traffic may traverse multiple regions.
• The service is available today in five region pairs connecting AWS US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California and Oregon), and Europe (London and Frankfurt) to their corresponding Google Cloud regions.

Where This Matters Most

AWS Interconnect – multicloud is particularly useful for organizations running genuinely distributed architectures:

• Best-of-breed workloads: Teams pairing AWS compute with a specialized service on another cloud can connect without building custom network paths.
• Mergers and acquisitions: Companies that inherit infrastructure from another provider can integrate networks without a full migration.
• Data residency and compliance: Workloads that must stay on a specific provider can still connect privately to AWS-hosted systems.

For Advanced Architectures or larger deployments, AWS Transit Gateway provides a centralized routing hub for multiple VPCs sharing an interconnect attachment, and AWS Cloud WAN extends that model globally.

Simplifying Multicloud Connectivity

AWS Interconnect – multicloud addresses a real and growing pain point: the operational burden of securely and reliably connecting AWS to other clouds. By automating encryption, resilience, and route propagation, and offering a console-driven setup instead of manual network engineering, AWS turns what used to be a multi-week networking project into something that can be provisioned in minutes. It doesn’t remove all engineering decisions; MTU, IP ranges, and routing still need attention, but it eliminates the undifferentiated heavy lifting of physical infrastructure and manual configuration. As Azure and OCI support arrives later in 2026, this looks set to become a standard building block for enterprises operating genuinely multi-cloud environments.