Amazon and Google’s new cloud link could make it easier to deal with outages

Google and Amazon Web Services are teaming up to offer a link between their cloud services, as reported earlier by Reuters. With this tool, companies can establish a private connection between AWS and Google Cloud within “minutes,” giving online businesses a possible safety net if either of the providers experiences an outage.

Though the tool is positioned as a way for customers to easily gain access to services from multiple cloud providers, Google says it comes with a “proactive monitoring system that detects and reacts to failures before customers suffer from their consequences.” It also offers a coordinated maintenance system designed to “avoid overlaps” that could impact service.

In October, AWS experienced a major outage that took down a swath of services, including Fortnite, Alexa, and Snapchat. Both Microsoft Azure and Cloudflare suffered outages in the following weeks, raising concerns about the risks of relying on just a handful of major internet infrastructure providers. AWS plans on rolling out a link to Microsoft Azure next year.

As noted in Google’s blog post, companies trying to connect cloud service providers would have to “manually set up complex networking components, including physical connections and equipment” in a process that could take weeks or months. Now, the two cloud providers say companies can quickly establish connectivity between cloud providers using their cloud console or API.