Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, the two giants fiercely competing for cloud market dominance, have decided to make a rare gesture of collaboration. The companies have officially launched a joint multi-cloud network service that is set to fundamentally change the way businesses manage their infrastructure. The new initiative allows private, high-speed connections to be established between the two providers’ platforms in just minutes, a drastic acceleration from the previous standard where the process took weeks.
The decision to bring the ecosystems together comes at a sensitive time for the industry. The market is still analysing the impact of the 20 October AWS outage, which paralysed thousands of websites, including apps such as Snapchat and Reddit. According to analysts at Parametrix, the incident cost US businesses between $500 million and $650 million. The technical combination of offerings – AWS Interconnect-multicloud and Google Cloud Cross-Cloud Interconnect – is intended to address these challenges by offering customers real redundancy and interoperability.
Salesforce is the first big beneficiary of this solution, signalling that the enterprise market was expecting such flexibility. While AWS remains the undisputed leader with revenues of $33 billion in the third quarter – a result more than double the $15.16 billion achieved by Google Cloud – this alliance shows a shift in strategy. Faced with gigantic investments in infrastructure under artificial intelligence and growing IT complexity, market leaders are moving away from a ‘walled garden’ policy to the pragmatic collaboration required to support critical workloads.
