Amazon and Google introduced a jointly developed multicloud networking service on Sunday to meet growing demand for reliable connectivity the companies said in a statement, at a time when even brief internet disruptions can cause major outages. The initiative will enable customers to establish private, high-speed links between the two companies’ computing platforms in minutes instead of weeks. The new service is being unveiled a little over a month after an Amazon Web Services outage on October 20 disrupted thousands of websites worldwide, knocking offline some of the internet’s most popular apps, including Snapchat and Reddit.
That outage will cost U.S. companies between $500 million and $650 million in losses, according to analytics firm Parametrix. The new offering combines AWS’ Interconnect–multicloud with Google Cloud’s Cross-Cloud Interconnect, to improve network interoperability, according to announcements by the two cloud providers. “This collaboration between AWS and Google Cloud represents a fundamental shift in multicloud connectivity,” said Robert Kennedy, vice president of network services at AWS.