Azure Multicloud Interconnect Simplifies Direct High-Throughput Networking to AWS

Microsoft and AWS have jointly introduced Azure Multicloud Interconnect for AWS into public preview, establishing a native, fully managed private network bridge between Microsoft Azure and AWS. Built directly on the foundation of Azure ExpressRoute and AWS Direct Connect, the capability enables organizations to provision high-bandwidth, low-latency private connectivity through a single logical resource and unified Open API specifications. Initial preview availability spans key regions across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, with target throughput scaling up to 100 Gbps upon general availability alongside native integration into Azure Private Link, AWS Transit Gateway, and AWS Cloud WAN. This release tackles one of the most persistent architectural friction points in modern enterprise cloud strategy: the operational overhead of cross-cloud networking. Historically, linking Azure and AWS privately required procurement through third-party colocation providers, managing bespoke router pairs, fine-tuning complex BGP route filters, and maintaining custom MACsec or IPsec encryption tunnels. When outages or performance degradations occurred, network engineers frequently faced protracted multi-vendor root-cause investigations. By shifting cross-cloud provisioning and operational monitoring onto hyperscaler-managed control planes, network architects can deploy cross-cloud links with software-defined ease, drastically reducing provisioning lead times from weeks to minutes. Architecturally, this development reflects a broader cloud industry shift toward managed inter-cloud interoperability. As enterprise AI workloads scale, organizations rarely keep all assets in a single walled garden; training datasets, feature stores, and proprietary inference endpoints are frequently dispersed across cloud boundaries. Previous multi-cloud strategies treated competing platforms as isolated silos connected by fragile overlays. The joint adoption of standardized OpenAPI interfaces between Microsoft and AWS signals an evolving consensus: hyperscalers must provide frictionless, high-throughput data transit if they want to support complex enterprise workflows such as distributed retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and real-time database replication. In practice, DevOps and cloud infrastructure teams should evaluate this interconnect to simplify cross-cloud data ingestion and consolidate multi-cloud management. Teams should assess existing colocation cross-connect costs and vendor overhead against managed interconnect pricing once production tiers are finalized. During the public preview, bandwidth is capped at 1 Gbps, meaning data-intensive batch migrations or ultra-high-throughput streaming pipelines should remain on dedicated private lines until 100 Gbps tiers reach general availability. Additionally, teams must audit cross-cloud security boundaries, ensuring identity validation and traffic isolation remain enforced across Azure Private Endpoints and AWS VPCs rather than relying solely on network-level abstraction.