Google and AWS join forces to kill widespread outage issues

What you need to know

• Amazon and Google reportedly revealed that they have joined hands to create a new "multicloud networking service."
• The purpose is to facilitate "reliable connectivity" and improve "network interoperability" to hopefully help reduce major outages.
• One major outage that occurred recently was on October 20, when AWS went down, taking a chunk of the internet around the world down with it.

After that massive AWS outage in October, Google and Amazon have joined hands to attempt to turn outages into a stone age relic.

The joint development between Amazon and Google was reported by Reuters, which cites a statement from both parties. According to the post, both companies have joined together to create a "multicloud networking service" for the sake of fostering "reliable connectivity." Reuters taps the vice president of network services at AWS, Robert Kennedy, who said, "This collaboration between AWS and Google Cloud represents a fundamental shift in multicloud connectivity."

The nitty-gritty details of this new service state that Amazon's side of the agreement brings its internconnect-multicloud services to the table.

This is then joined by Google Cloud's Cross-Cloud Interconnect. The reports say that, in tandem, Amazon's and Google's cloud services should improve the "network interoperability" to hopefully reduce the likelihood of such major outages from taking down the internet. Officially, the vice president and general manager of cloud networking at Google Cloud, Rob Enns, informed Reuters that this joint measure is to make it easier for data and apps to move "between clouds" for the consumer.

Amazon and Google add that their joint work to bring about this multicloud networking service should help customers with "private" and "high-speed" connections between the two.

October 20 was a dark day... for a few hours

It was hard to miss it, as October 20 was when a massive AWS outage impacted thousands, effectively taking the internet down for several hours. AWS (Amazon Web Services) had its outage peak at roughly 3 AM ET, though things started faltering at around midnight. The outage hit the US-EAST-1 (Northern Virginia) region pretty hard, which is the service's largest data center hub.

This outage, which took out a chunk of the internet, as well as major apps like Reddit, Snapchat, and even Fortnite, started to draw attention to a critical fact: AWS is heavily relied on. Government services around the world were even impacted, drawing further cries for there to be diversity in multi-cloud strategies, so this doesn't (necessarily) happen so harshly.

The issues within the EC2 network caused severe latency and "increased error rates" for those trying to get online. AWS even stated that its connection health was "degraded," prompting it to continue to seek measures to alleviate such issues. After roughly six hours, apps and services were beginning to come back online, but the damage had been done.