AWS and Microsoft are offering a managed private link between their clouds. AWS Interconnect – multicloud with Azure is entering public preview with a few-click provisioning flow, MACsec encryption and four independent logical paths.

The short answer

CharacteristicAnnounced scope
ConnectivityDedicated private bandwidth between AWS and Azure.
ResilienceFour paths across separate facilities and routers.
SecurityMACsec encryption between edge routers.
Initial regionsNorthern Virginia, Northern California, Sydney and Frankfurt.

The service remains in preview. Bandwidth options, regions and contractual commitments require verification before critical use.

Less cabling, not less architecture

Connecting both clouds has often required third-party carriers, physical circuits and multiple consoles. A managed service cuts provisioning time and standardizes part of operations. It does not choose addressing, routing or segmentation for the customer.

Teams still need to prevent overlapping CIDR ranges, control advertised routes and ensure that a mistake cannot turn one cloud into an unintended transit path for the other.

Four paths and stated 99.99% availability

AWS describes a quad-redundant architecture intended to withstand router maintenance, two additional independent disruptions and even a complete site loss. That strengthens the network foundation, but applications also need multiple zones, endpoints and recovery mechanisms.

An available circuit does not prove DNS, firewalls or cross-cloud identity are correctly configured. Failure testing remains essential.

Data transfer cost still matters

Private connectivity simplifies transport but does not make transfers free. Model port, bandwidth and egress charges on both sides. An architecture continuously moving large datasets between clouds may cost more than placing compute near the data.

Measure flows per application and schedule heavy replication deliberately. Frankfurt-to-Frankfurt connectivity may suit European workloads, but it still requires application-level latency testing.

Security and observability

MACsec protects data over the provider interconnect. Application-level TLS remains useful end to end. AWS includes Network Synthetic Monitor to help locate packet loss, potentially reducing ambiguity when troubleshooting across vendors.

The collaboration removes a meaningful part of multicloud complexity. It is most relevant to organizations already split between AWS and Azure; by itself, it is not a reason to distribute an application that works well in one cloud.