DE-CIX just switched on something most cloud teams never think about until the day they actually need it: a second, physically separate path into Microsoft Azure, now running live in New York, Frankfurt, Madrid, Amsterdam and Singapore.
DE-CIX calls the tech Azure ExpressRoute Metro, and the idea holds up once you strip away the jargon. Instead of running one dedicated line from your infrastructure into Azure, you get two, landing at different ExpressRoute locations in the same city. A backhoe cuts fiber near one data center, or a facility loses power, and traffic just reroutes through the other connection instead of going dark. For AI workloads or anything latency-sensitive, that stops being a nice-to-have pretty fast.
DE-CIX now runs 29 of these Azure on-ramps across 24 cities, and companies can reach any of them remotely through its backbone, even from cities where the exchange has no physical Azure link. The platform also connects straight into AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud and IBM Cloud, moving close to a terabit of hyperscaler bandwidth across more than 160 on-ramps, which matters if you already run workloads across more than one provider.
Christoph Dietzel, who heads products and research at DE-CIX, put it plainly: physically separating network interconnects is just standard practice for resilient operations, and the company bakes that into how it builds every exchange. He sees the setup as letting businesses run multi-cloud or remote-backup strategies without having to wire the connectivity together themselves.
Microsoft’s Sudha Mahajan, a partner on the Azure Cloud & AI team, said linking through DE-CIX gives customers a low-latency path straight into Microsoft’s network, and that the ExpressRoute Metro design keeps critical workloads alive even when part of the connection goes down.
Most days, nobody notices any of this. It only matters on the day something actually breaks, and that’s really the only test that counts for infrastructure like this. With more AI workloads landing in the cloud and outages getting costlier every year, this kind of redundancy is quietly turning from a nice extra into something companies just expect.
