Amazon Web Services Inc. has announced a rare collaboration with one of its biggest rivals, Google Cloud, just hours before it kicks off its annual re:Invent customer conference.

The two cloud computing giants said Monday that they’re launching a jointly developed multicloud network service that’s designed to meet the rising demand for reliable connectivity at a time when enterprises are increasingly running their most critical services in the cloud. They’re looking to prevent problems caused by major outages such as the ones that struck AWS and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud last month.

The new service will allow customers to establish private, high-bandwidth links between AWS and Google Cloud in a matter of minutes, rather than spending weeks engineering their own connections. Amazon said it combines the AWS Interconnect Multicloud service with Google’s Cross-Cloud Interconnect offering and is meant to enhance network interoperability.

According to Robert Kennedy, vice president of network services at AWS, the service “represents a fundamental shift in multicloud connectivity.”

Google Cloud Vice President and General Manager of Cloud Networking Rob Enns hailed the new service too, saying it’ll make it easier for customers to transfer applications and data across the two cloud platforms. It’s an acknowledgment by the two companies that most enterprises don’t want to be locked into a single cloud vendor, and instead prefer to adopt what’s known as a “hybrid cloud strategy.”

The launch of the new service has come a little late for customers affected by last month’s AWS outage, but it may at least help to prevent a recurrence of that situation. On Oct. 20, AWS experienced a severe disruption at its critical North Virginia data center cluster, taking offline some of the internet’s most popular services and applications, including OpenAI Group PBC’s ChatGPT, Reddit, Disney+ and Snapchat, for several hours. Data from the analysis firm Parametrix says the incident cost companies an estimated $500 million to $650 million in losses, even though most customers were back online after seven-to-eight hours.

The companies said their new multicloud interconnection service is available from today in preview at select AWS regions. It’ll expand to other regions in the coming weeks, and Amazon also wants to onboard other cloud providers, including Microsoft.

AWS said the tool will help fulfill “interoperability requirements” when customers migrate applications from one cloud to the other and also eliminate the complexities of managing “global multi-layered networks” at scale. In addition, customers will be able to link AWS networking services such as AWS Cloud WAN, AWS Transit Gateway and Amazon VPC to other cloud platforms.

The companies also announced a marquee customer in Salesforce Inc., which has become one of the first enterprises to adopt the new service. “[It] allows us to establish these critical bridges to Google Cloud with the same ease as deploying internal AWS resources, utilizing pre-built capacity pools and the tools our teams already know and love,” said Salesforce Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Jim Ostrognai.

The partnership is notable because it’s a rare example of the two cloud computing giants working together, rather than attempting to outdo each other. For years, the companies have been locked in a bitter fight with each other and rivals such as Microsoft and Oracle Corp. to try and establish dominance of the cloud computing market, but nowadays it seems they recognize there’s also a need to cooperate on occasion.

Customers should at least appreciate the enhanced reliability the collaboration provides, and it’s much needed, as data center infrastructure is coming under increased strain as a result of the surging traffic related to artificial intelligence.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Meta AI