For most of cloud computing’s history, “multicloud” has meant running separate, disconnected environments and stitching them together yourself, usually with a lot of egress fees and custom networking glue. That’s starting to change, and the shift is worth paying attention to if any part of your infrastructure touches more than one provider.
AWS and Google Cloud have been piloting a direct multicloud networking service that lets workloads on one platform connect to the other without routing traffic through the public internet or building your own VPN mesh. It’s currently in preview, with Google Cloud as the launch partner and Microsoft Azure confirmed to join the arrangement. Separately, Google used its Cloud Next conference this year to introduce cross-cloud caching, a layer that stores frequently accessed AWS and Azure data on first read, cutting the egress costs and latency that normally come with querying data that lives outside Google’s own network.
Neither of these is a small feature. Together, they signal that the hyperscalers are starting to treat multicloud interoperability as a product category, not an inconvenience customers have to solve themselves.
Why this is happening now
The honest answer is regulatory and competitive pressure as much as customer demand. AWS and Azure control roughly 80% of the cloud infrastructure market between them, and regulators, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority among them, have been openly questioning whether that dominance makes it too hard for enterprises to move workloads or run genuinely multicloud architectures. Building direct interconnects is partly a response to that scrutiny, and partly a recognition that large enterprises increasingly run workloads across two or three providers by necessity: data residency requirements, M&A history, or simply not wanting a single point of vendor failure.
Whatever the motivation, the practical effect is the same: the friction of running infrastructure across providers is starting to come down.
What this actually changes for practitioners
If you’re managing infrastructure that spans providers today, the near-term impact is narrower than the announcements suggest, these services are in preview, with limited regions and partner combinations, and Azure’s participation is still rolling out rather than fully live everywhere. But the direction matters for how you plan:
- Egress costs become less of an architectural constraint. A big reason teams avoid genuine multicloud designs is that moving data between providers is expensive. Direct interconnects and caching layers chip away at that.
- Cross-cloud data agents are arriving alongside the networking layer. Google’s Cloud Next announcements paired the caching work with agent tooling aimed at querying and orchestrating data that lives outside Google Cloud entirely.
- This is a reason to revisit multicloud avoidance decisions, not a reason to migrate today. If your organization ruled out a second cloud provider specifically because of networking cost and complexity, that calculus is shifting.
Where to keep watching
These programs are moving fast and are explicitly previews, so specifics, regions, pricing, which provider pairs are supported, will keep changing through the rest of 2026. If multicloud has been on your roadmap as a “someday” item because of cost and complexity, this is worth a calendar reminder to check back in a quarter, not something to act on immediately.
Key takeaway: The hyperscalers are actively lowering the cost and friction of running workloads across their platforms, not out of generosity, but because regulatory pressure and enterprise reality are pushing them there. That doesn’t make multicloud free or simple, but it does mean the “just pick one cloud and stay there” default is going to get harder to justify on cost grounds alone.
Is multicloud already part of your architecture, or has cost kept you on a single provider? Tell us what’s actually driving that decision in the comments.
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