As organizations accelerate AI adoption and modernize their digital estates, applications, data, and infrastructure increasingly span multiple cloud environments. Customers are choosing the best platform for each workload, leveraging unique capabilities across providers to drive innovation, resilience, and business agility.

Yet while multicloud strategies have become commonplace, networking between cloud environments remains complex. Establishing private connectivity often requires customers to manually stitch together services, coordinate provisioning across providers, manage multiple operational processes, and navigate fragmented support experiences. What should be a straightforward connectivity decision can take weeks or months to implement and manage.

Today, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are taking an important step toward simplifying that experience.

Microsoft Azure and AWS are excited to collaborate on a multicloud networking solution that uses both AWS Interconnect – multicloud and Azure Multicloud Interconnect for network interoperability, enabling customers to establish a private, high-performance private connectivity between Microsoft Azure and AWS through a streamlined, cloud-native experience.

This collaboration is built using the Open API specifications for network interoperability. Azure Multicloud Interconnect helps remove much of the complexity traditionally associated with multicloud networking. Customers can provision connectivity through an integrated experience while benefiting from enterprise-grade performance, resiliency, security, and operational simplicity.

Simplifying multicloud connectivity

Until now, organizations connecting Azure and AWS environments required careful planning, physical connectivity, routing configuration, provisioning coordination, monitoring, and lifecycle management to assemble and maintain multiple components across providers.

Azure Multicloud Interconnect fundamentally changes this model. With Microsoft and AWS collaborating using the standardized Open API specification, customers can establish dedicated private connectivity through a simplified experience that abstracts the underlying complexity of multicloud networking. Rather than focusing on infrastructure management, organizations can focus on delivering applications, moving data, and accelerating business outcomes.

The result is a high-bandwidth, more predictable path to deploying multicloud architectures for mission-critical workloads.

Designed for the AI era

Training and inference workloads frequently require access to data distributed across environments. Enterprises are increasingly architecting applications that span cloud boundaries while maintaining performance, security, and compliance requirements.

Azure Multicloud Interconnect is designed to support these evolving requirements with high-capacity private connectivity that extends to Azure Private Link, providing an end-to-end private path between the clouds.

This combination of high-performance connectivity and operational simplicity enables customers to move faster as they build the next generation of AI-enabled applications and services.

As AI transforms every industry, customers need the freedom to place data, applications, and infrastructure wherever it delivers the greatest business value. Azure Multicloud Interconnect helps make that possible by providing resilient, high-performance, private connectivity between Azure and AWS through a simplified, cloud-native experience. Together, we are reducing the complexity of multicloud networking and giving customers the scale, reliability, and agility they need to power the next generation of AI and data-driven innovation.

Customers told us they wanted a better way to connect workloads spanning AWS and Azure, and the old ways of doing it were clunky. With AWS Interconnect-multicloud and Azure Multicloud Interconnect, we’re proving what’s possible when both sides commit to a high bar: MACsec security out of the box, four-nines availability, and scalability at the click of a button.

—Robert Kennedy, VP of Network Services at AWS

Advancing an open multicloud future

Azure Multicloud Interconnect represents more than a new connectivity offering—it is a step toward a more open and interconnected cloud ecosystem.

Looking ahead, we see the opportunity to extend this model beyond a single cloud-to-cloud relationship. The same open API specification can help enable broader interoperability across hyperscale cloud providers, creating a more consistent experience for customers operating in increasingly diverse multicloud environments.

Customers can deploy connectivity at speeds up to 100 Gbps from day one at general availability, helping meet the needs of high-bandwidth applications while providing the foundation for future growth. As demand increases, capacity can expand dynamically, enabling organizations to scale without disrupting operations or redesigning their network architecture.

Beyond hyperscalers, this approach has the potential to simplify connectivity with network service providers and telecommunications carriers. By adopting a common interoperability model, cloud providers and carriers can work together to streamline last-mile connectivity, accelerate provisioning, and reduce operational complexity across the end-to-end customer journey.

Our long-term vision is an open ecosystem where hyperscalers, network service providers, and telecommunications carriers use a common interoperability framework to establish and operate connectivity through standardized APIs. Customers should be able to provision trusted, high-performance connectivity between clouds, metro networks, and enterprise locations with the same simplicity and automation they expect from modern cloud services.

To learn more about how to implement multicloud networking on Azure, please visit the in-depth blog or visit the Microsoft Learn page to get started. To read the AWS announcement, please visit their blog.