A private path AWS has not offered before
AWS's Interconnect service addresses a specific and long-standing multicloud pain point: moving traffic between an AWS Virtual Private Cloud and an Azure Virtual Network without routing it over the public internet. Until now, enterprises running workloads split across AWS and Azure typically stitched together their own cross-cloud paths using VPN tunnels, third-party network carriers, or colocation facilities where both clouds maintained a physical presence, each approach adding its own latency, cost, and operational complexity. Interconnect replaces that patchwork with a managed, private circuit that AWS provisions directly.
The service is explicitly scoped to AWS-to-Azure connectivity for now, which is a notable choice given that Google Cloud is the third major hyperscaler enterprises most commonly combine with AWS in multicloud deployments. Whether AWS extends Interconnect to Google Cloud or keeps it Azure-specific will say a good deal about which multicloud pairings AWS considers most commercially important to support natively.
The preview's limits are the real story
The headline capability matters less right now than its preview-stage limitations. Each Interconnect circuit is capped at 1 Gbit per second of throughput, a ceiling that rules out the service for any workload with serious bulk data transfer or replication requirements between clouds. More consequential still, AWS has stated plainly that the preview carries no service level agreement, meaning there is no contractual uptime commitment behind this private path, however reliable it proves in practice.
AWS has also confirmed that circuits created during the preview period will be deleted before the service reaches general availability. That is an explicit signal that this is a feature-validation exercise rather than infrastructure meant for production use, and any enterprise architecture that comes to depend on a preview circuit will face a forced migration once AWS transitions to the generally available version.
Why AWS is building this now
AWS's timing reflects a broader shift in enterprise cloud strategy that has been building for several years: genuine multicloud deployments, not just disaster-recovery footprints in a second cloud, have become common enough among large enterprises that hyperscalers now see native cross-cloud connectivity as a product worth building rather than a workaround to tolerate. Enterprises running SAP on Azure while keeping data platforms on AWS, or splitting AI workloads across both providers to manage GPU availability, have driven real demand for exactly the kind of private connectivity Interconnect offers.
That AWS chose to build this rather than leave it to third-party network providers also suggests AWS sees strategic value in controlling the connectivity layer itself. A managed service lets AWS capture both the transit revenue and the operational relationship for cross-cloud traffic that would otherwise flow through a specialized network carrier with no particular loyalty to AWS over any other cloud.
What this changes for multicloud network architecture
For network and infrastructure teams managing genuine multicloud deployments, Interconnect's eventual general availability could meaningfully simplify architecture diagrams that currently route cross-cloud traffic through a third-party carrier's point of presence or a self-managed VPN gateway. Removing a hop and a vendor relationship from that path has real operational value, assuming the generally available version ships with throughput limits and an SLA suitable for production traffic, neither of which the preview currently offers.
Teams evaluating this now should treat the preview strictly as a proof of concept for testing connectivity patterns and validating that Interconnect's routing and security model fits their architecture, not as a foundation to build production dependencies on. Given the stated plan to delete preview circuits before general availability, any integration work done now should be designed so it can be re-pointed at new circuits later with minimal rework, rather than hard-coded against preview-specific configuration.
The open question of Microsoft's reciprocal move
Interconnect is, notably, an AWS product rather than a jointly announced AWS-Microsoft service, which raises the question of how Azure's own networking team is responding on its side of the connection. A private cross-cloud path inherently requires cooperation from both clouds' networking infrastructure, so Microsoft's willingness to support AWS's management of that connectivity is itself informative about how the two companies are choosing to compete and cooperate in a market where most large enterprises now run meaningful workloads on both.
Enterprises should watch whether Microsoft responds with a comparable Azure-native offering, builds deeper reciprocal support into Interconnect's existing design, or takes a different approach entirely. Any of those paths would shape how multicloud networking strategy consolidates over the next year, and committing deeply to one hyperscaler's version of cross-cloud connectivity before that picture clarifies carries real architectural risk.
