Amazon Web Services and Megaport moved on Thursday, October 22, to automate one of the most stubbornly manual jobs in enterprise networking: ordering and building a private, high-capacity connection into the cloud. Megaport announced support for AWS Interconnect - last mile, a new managed connection model from AWS that is now live in public preview and is designed to simplify how businesses connect their own infrastructure to AWS.
The problem the service attacks is familiar to any network engineer who has provisioned a dedicated cloud link the old way. A traditional connection involves arranging a port, obtaining a letter of authorization, and coordinating a physical cross-connect, then configuring the logical layers on top — VLANs, IP subnets, MTU settings and BGP peering — often across two organizations and several tickets. AWS Interconnect - last mile folds that work into an automated flow: customers can start an order in either the Megaport Portal or the AWS Management Console and complete it in the other, while AWS and Megaport automate the underlying network configuration, including the VLANs, subnets, MTU and BGP.
The specifications are aimed at enterprises and AI infrastructure providers whose requirements have grown beyond traditional AWS Hosted Connections. Customers can select speeds from 1 Gbps to 100 Gbps. At general availability, the service will include MACsec encryption and four redundant links across two sites, building resilience into the product rather than leaving each customer to engineer it. AWS's own announcement adds that bandwidth can be scaled dynamically without downtime, that the service is backed by a 99.99 percent SLA with zero-downtime maintenance, and that it is accessible through the AWS Console, CLI and API.
"AWS Interconnect gives enterprises another way to scale their AWS connectivity without taking on more network infrastructure to operate themselves," said Michael Reid, chief executive officer of Megaport. He noted that for Megaport customers the connection lands on the same platform they already use to reach other clouds, data centers and services, so they can raise capacity into AWS while staying connected to a broader infrastructure environment.
Robert Kennedy, vice president of networking services at AWS, made the same point from the cloud side. "AWS Interconnect - last mile is designed to make our high-capacity cloud connectivity even simpler to deploy and operate," Kennedy said. "Working with AWS Partners like Megaport gives customers more choice in how they connect their infrastructure to AWS, with automation, encryption, and resilience built into the service."
The preview is initially supporting Ashburn, Virginia, and San Jose, California — two key US interconnection regions, covering the US-East-1 and US-West-1 metros — and Megaport says general availability will follow at the end of 2026. Megaport, which spans more than 1,200 enabled locations worldwide, is positioning Interconnect as an addition to its complete suite of AWS connectivity options rather than a replacement for them.
For enterprise IT teams, the significance is less the headline bandwidth than the operating model. Private cloud connectivity has lagged the rest of the cloud in automation: compute and storage became API calls years ago, while the physical path into the cloud still ran on paperwork and patch panels. A managed, console-ordered link with encryption and redundancy included — and, per AWS, no-downtime scaling — moves that last mile closer to the way the rest of the stack already works, at exactly the moment AI workloads are pushing far more data across it.