AWS Interconnect - multicloud now offers a free 500 Mbps tier
Amazon Web Services announced a new free tier for its AWS Interconnect multicloud service, offering customers a no-charge 500 Mbps private connection between AWS and other major cloud service providers. The free tier provides the same network resilience and device redundancy as paid offerings, with capacity to transfer approximately 160 TB of data monthly, sufficient for significant multicloud workloads, data replication, and hybrid application architectures. The Interconnect service uses an open specification already adopted by Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, with Microsoft Azure support planned for 2026. Each free tier connection includes Amazon CloudWatch Network Synthetic Monitor at no additional cost to help customers monitor network health and performance across cloud environments. The offering is limited to one local Interconnect per customer per AWS region to each generally available cloud service provider, though customers remain responsible for charges from the other cloud provider's side of the infrastructure.
Why It Matters
This move significantly lowers the barrier to multicloud adoption by eliminating AWS-side connectivity costs for smaller deployments. By offering substantial bandwidth at no charge, AWS is positioning itself as the hub for multicloud architectures while potentially increasing overall cloud consumption across providers. The open specification approach could standardize multicloud networking and reduce vendor lock-in concerns that have historically limited enterprise multicloud strategies.
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