Microsoft and AWS Partner on Turnkey Multicloud Interconnect for High-Speed Cross-Cloud Networking

Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have announced a collaborative networking capability that establishes direct, high-performance private interconnectivity between Microsoft Azure and AWS. Built on shared Open API specifications for network interoperability, the solution combines Microsoft’s Azure Multicloud Interconnect with AWS Interconnect – multicloud. Currently released in public preview, the service enables enterprises to provision dedicated, Layer 3 private connections between Azure Virtual Networks and AWS Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) without deploying intermediate colocation infrastructure. The architecture delivers bandwidth scaling up to 100 Gbps, built-in IEEE 802.1AE MACsec link encryption, and quad-redundant path diversity engineered for four-nines (99.99%) availability. Historically, architecting private connectivity between AWS and Azure has been an operational nightmare. Network engineering teams were forced to act as systems integrators—procuring separate Azure ExpressRoute and AWS Direct Connect circuits, contracting third-party colocation providers, and manually managing BGP peering, routing tables, and failover topologies. Misconfigurations regularly produced asymmetric routing, latency spikes, and costly troubleshooting cycles. By turning cross-cloud peering into a first-class, managed cloud resource provisioned through an exchange of activation keys, both providers eliminate months of lead time and heavy maintenance overhead, empowering platform teams to treat cross-cloud connectivity as standard infrastructure-as-code. This joint release reflects a fundamental shift in hyperscaler strategy driven by enterprise AI and distributed data architectures. Modern AI workloads frequently require training models or running inference across environments while drawing streaming operational datasets from another platform. Hyperscalers can no longer afford to lock customers into walled gardens without impeding workload performance and customer velocity. Following AWS’s previous interoperability efforts with Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, bringing Azure into this open specification framework completes native, high-speed mesh connectivity across all major enterprise cloud providers. For practitioners, this managed interconnect dramatically reduces architectural complexity, but it introduces distinct operational and FinOps considerations. While the service abstracts router provisioning and BGP management, teams must remain vigilant regarding cross-cloud data transfer and egress costs, which still apply. Practitioners should prioritize this capability for latency-sensitive, cross-cloud microservices, federated analytics, and disaster-recovery pipelines, rather than continuous bulk data transfers. Platform architects should evaluate the public preview to validate throughput consistency, benchmark MACsec overhead against compliance requirements, and update infrastructure-as-code definitions to incorporate the new interconnect resources into automated landing zones.