AWS's inevitable destiny: becoming the next Lumen

For a decade, AWS's position on multi-cloud was clear: don't.

Multi-cloud meant a lowest-common-denominator architecture. Multi-cloud meant giving up the managed services, the security integrations, the features that justified the lock-in. Multi-cloud was for that indecisive tranche of companies that couldn't commit. And until 2019, mentioning other clouds at all was forbidden at AWS conferences.

Then in November 2025, AWS launched AWS Interconnect with Google Cloud as a launch partner, with Microsoft Azure joining in 2026. Just a bit of jiggery-pokery in the console to connect your VPC to a competitor's network, and boom: the thing they spent years telling you was a mistake is now productized and fully managed. AWS didn't change its mind, so much as get told by about 84 percent of its customers to shut up and get with the times.

The pattern

AWS has a tell: it markets hardest wherever ...