AWS and Azure Launch a Managed Private Multicloud Connection

AWS and Microsoft have introduced a managed way to connect workloads across their clouds without sending traffic over the public internet or stitching together a customer-managed collection of carrier, colocation, routing, and security components. On AWS, the offering is AWS Interconnect – multicloud with Microsoft Azure connectivity; Microsoft calls its counterpart Azure Multicloud Interconnect for AWS. Azure connectivity entered Public Preview on August 31, 2026. 26

What the service provides

The service creates a private, dedicated network path between AWS and Azure through a simplified managed experience. Rather than treating each side as an unrelated circuit project, customers establish one logical interconnect resource that the providers coordinate across their networking environments. Microsoft describes it as a provider-managed service built on Azure ExpressRoute and AWS Direct Connect foundations. 612

AWS says customers can provision the connection on demand, while Microsoft says the service can extend private connectivity to Azure Private Link for an end-to-end private path between clouds. 26

Preview footprint and stated capabilities

The Azure preview is initially available in:

• US East (N. Virginia)
• US West (N. California)
• Asia Pacific (Sydney)
• Europe (Frankfurt) 2

The companies advertise connectivity of up to 100 Gbps. Their published service descriptions also cite quad-redundant, geographically diverse infrastructure, MACsec encryption for traffic in transit, and a 99.99% availability target. Because this is a public preview, teams should confirm the available capacity, regional pairings, and applicable terms for their specific design before relying on those figures in production architecture. 236

Why this is different from a traditional cross-cloud circuit

Private AWS–Azure connectivity has historically meant coordinating multiple parties and systems: cloud attachments, carrier or colocation arrangements, routing, redundant paths, encryption, and operational ownership on both cloud sides. That can make provisioning and changes take weeks or months. 612

The new model abstracts much of that inter-provider coordination. Customers consume a managed connection rather than assembling every underlying component themselves, reducing the operational burden of building a private path between an AWS environment and an Azure environment. 612

That does not eliminate network design work. Enterprises still need to decide which workloads communicate across clouds, how routes and segmentation should work, and what resiliency and security controls their own architecture requires. The important shift is that the intercloud handoff is managed through a coordinated service instead of a bespoke integration.

Why Azure joining matters

AWS Interconnect – multicloud is AWS’s managed connectivity product for linking Amazon VPCs with other cloud environments. With Azure in preview, AWS says the service now spans the three major non-AWS cloud providers it names: Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. 25

For organizations that already use more than one cloud, that creates a more consistent approach to private connectivity. It is especially relevant when applications, data platforms, or disaster-recovery designs must communicate across cloud boundaries but public-internet paths are unsuitable for operational or security reasons.

Why AWS and Microsoft are collaborating

This partnership is best understood as an interoperability response to real multicloud deployments—not evidence that AWS and Microsoft are converging strategically. The providers are collaborating on the network handoff because customers increasingly need to connect workloads that are already distributed across cloud platforms.

The technical mechanism is an open network-interoperability API specification. AWS and Google Cloud introduced that specification with their multicloud networking collaboration in late 2025, aiming to automate private, high-speed connectivity between their respective networking services. 1824 Microsoft’s adoption extends that approach to AWS–Azure connectivity. AWS says the specification can be adopted by cloud providers to integrate with AWS Interconnect. 1024

Is this an industry standard yet?

Not yet. The specification is open and now has participation from AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and Microsoft Azure through the services AWS lists, but that is different from broad, industry-wide standardization. 2523

The more immediate significance is practical: a common interoperability approach can reduce the need for each cloud-to-cloud pairing to be engineered as a separate bespoke integration. AWS has described its objective as a unified specification that other cloud service providers could adopt. 2024

What to watch next

The current Azure offering is a public preview, so its initial regions and published capabilities should not be read as a guarantee of future geographic coverage or bandwidth options. The announced framework points toward broader participation by cloud providers and, potentially, network service providers and carriers, but the supplied announcements do not establish a timetable for those expansions. 62024

For enterprises moving data, applications, and AI-related workloads across environments, the key question is less whether every workload should become multicloud and more whether the workloads that already span clouds have a private, resilient, and operationally manageable path between them. This service is designed to make that path simpler to provision. 26