AWS Interconnect reaches general availability, adding a new option to simplify last mile connectivity

AWS has made AWS Interconnect – multicloud generally available (GA), and has also unveiled AWS Interconnect – last mile, which simplifies private high-speed connections from branch offices, data centers, and remote locations to AWS.

The multicloud capability is a managed private Layer 3 connection that directly links an Amazon VPC with a VPC in another cloud. Initial support is for Google Cloud, with Microsoft Azure support to be added in late 2026. Traffic flows through AWS's global backbone and the partner cloud's private network, so it does not traverse the public internet.

Security and reliability are also built in by design. The physical link segment uses IEEE 802.1AE MACsec encryption, and each connection is composed of multiple logical links distributed across at least 2 physical facilities, guarding against failure of a single device or building. Monitoring integrates with Amazon CloudWatch, and each connection includes a Network Synthetic Monitor that tracks round-trip latency and packet loss.

AWS has published the underlying specification for this feature on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license, allowing other cloud providers to implement it and become AWS Interconnect partners. To become a partner, providers must not only implement the technical spec but also meet operational requirements such as resiliency standards, support commitments, and SLAs.

Provisioning takes just a few steps in the console.

• Create an AWS Interconnect from the AWS Direct Connect console
• Select the provider to connect to, the AWS Region, the peer cloud Region, bandwidth, and project ID
• Use the activation key issued by AWS on the peer cloud side
• Routes propagate automatically, and connection status can be checked in the console

In the demo, AWS's eu-central-1 was connected to GCP's europe-west3. On the GCP side, the gcloud CLI was used instead of the console to create the transport and VPC peering, and on the AWS side, a Direct Connect gateway was connected to a Virtual Private Gateway (VGW), after which a route to the GCP CIDR block was added to the route table.

Finally, instances were launched on both AWS and GCP, and the connection was verified by accessing a simple HTTP server on the AWS side via private IP from GCP. However, AWS/GCP VPC CIDRs must not overlap, IPv4/IPv6 settings must match on both sides, and MTU must also match. Mismatched MTU can cause packet drops, fragmentation, silent data loss, reduced throughput, and connection instability.