AWS and Microsoft just made it easier to skip the middleman connecting their clouds, and that’s not great news for the companies that built businesses doing exactly that. The two hyperscalers opened public preview of managed private networking between AWS and Azure, extending a multicloud framework AWS first launched with Google Cloud back in 2025.
The practical change is real. Private AWS-Azure connectivity has historically meant coordinating physical circuits, third-party providers, separate monitoring systems, and support teams who often see completely different slices of the same outage. AWS says that process can take weeks or months. Its new Interconnect service, paired with Microsoft’s Azure Multicloud Interconnect, turns much of that into something ordered through cloud consoles and APIs instead.
The idea isn’t brand new. AWS introduced this interoperability model with Google Cloud in late 2025, and Microsoft was already expected to join sometime in 2026. What’s changed is scope: Azure now sits alongside Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure inside AWS’s managed cross-cloud networking framework, which means all three major non-AWS clouds now connect through a similar provisioning model.
For now, the Azure integration only covers four regions, Northern Virginia, Northern California, Sydney, and Frankfurt, so this isn’t a global rollout yet. But the engineering underneath it is substantial. AWS describes four independent logical paths spread across physically separate interconnection facilities, designed to survive router maintenance plus two additional independent failures without dropping traffic. MACsec encryption protects the connection between cloud edge routers, and AWS ties the whole architecture to 99.99% availability.
The bigger question sits with the companies that used to fill this gap. Carriers, exchanges, and networking specialists built real businesses stitching AWS and Azure together through private backbones and colocation infrastructure. If both hyperscalers now offer that connectivity natively through an API, the pitch for inserting a third party gets harder to make, at least for customers whose main need was simply connecting those two specific clouds.
That threat has limits, though. Enterprise networks stretch well beyond AWS and Azure, covering offices, factories, edge deployments, and SaaS platforms that hyperscaler interconnect services don’t touch. Providers offering colocation, carrier neutrality, and connectivity beyond the hyperscaler world can still sell something distinct. The plain cross-connect business, though, just got a lot harder to justify.
