Google LLC today announced an expansion to its Cloud Interconnect service that will allow enterprises to connect any public cloud with Google Cloud through a secure, high-performance network called Cross-Cloud Interconnect.

As more enterprises begin to adopt hybrid and multicloud distribution for their applications, they have begun to face problems with connectivity as they build and run their services and connect with clients. Attempting to unify and manage infrastructure across multiple clouds can become an increasing burden, especially given software-as-a-service workloads.

Cross-Cloud Interconnect provides a simplified configuration that minimizes hardware and reduces overhead in order to allow enterprises to set up connectivity more easily across multicloud environments for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Alibaba Cloud. Additional support is planned for more providers based on customer demand.

Using the service, engineers will be able to run applications on multiple clouds, host SaaS in a multicloud environment, or migrate workloads from one cloud to another, without complex configurations and with less downtime.

Speaking to SiliconANGLE, Muninder Sambi, vice president and general manager of networking at Google Cloud, explained that using Cross-Cloud Interconnect will allow developers to use Google Cloud Platform infrastructure while running distributed applications across public clouds.

“You can have your web applications in any cloud provider while also using Google Cloud Platform native services such as Spanner, Storage Buckets, BigQuery or many others,” Sambi said.

In particular, the recent rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads has begun to drive customers to distribute applications across multiple cloud environments that best fit their applications. Google has carved out a market niche in providing artificial intelligence and machine learning services, including new virtual machines and AI tools, which can now be delivered to other cloud providers through Cross-Cloud Interconnect.

“We’ve also seen a big group in AI workloads,” Sambi said. “We have to realize in a multicloud world applications are of different types and every customer has a very different journey into the cloud. AI and ML networking fundamentally change what is needed, such as high bandwidth, and you need low latency when you are servicing ML models and reliability for enterprise requests. Now customers can use Google’s infrastructure for training and serving models and they can then be consumed by any other cloud provider.”

With Cross-Cloud Interconnect, setups do not require new hardware and use the same features as Cloud Interconnect. It’s available in 10-gigabit-per-second or 100-gigabit-per-second speed options. Customers can also take advantage of private and secure connectivity between clouds, a 99.9% reliability standard and the promise of a much lower total cost of ownership.

Early-access customers such as large chain grocery store Walmart Inc. and video technology platform Pexip AS have already been putting the platform to use to build their own apps.

“We partnered with Google Cloud to leverage their global network for hybrid and multicloud networking,” said Gerald Bothello, senior director of software engineering at Walmart. “With Cross-Cloud Interconnect, we were able to simplify connectivity between cloud providers, shorten time to production, and reduce overall costs.”

Google also significantly enhanced Private Service Connect to support Cross-Cloud Interconnect, which makes it easier to create private and secure connections from virtual private clouds to Google, partners or services.

Today, Cross-Cloud Interconnect users now have access to Private Service Connect. Service Connection Policies has also been added in preview, which allows administrators to create policies to automate connectivity for private connections for managed services. As a result, service admins will be able to easily deploy, update and delete published services connected to Private Service Connect without needing to open networking tickets.

Enterprise clients with specialized needs can get access to Dedicated and Partner Interconnect offerings, which provide secure and highly resilient connectivity for hybrid cloud networking. Dedicated Interconnect is now generally available and provides 10-gigabit-per-second and 100-gigabit-per-second options across 144 locations.

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