Everyone says they love multi‑cloud—until the invoice arrives. The marketing slides promised agility and freedom. The billing portal delivered despair. You thought connecting Azure, AWS, and GCP would make your environment “resilient.” Instead, you’ve built a networking matryoshka doll—three layers of identical pipes, each pretending to be mission‑critical.The truth is, your so‑called freedom is just complexity with better branding. You’re paying three providers for the privilege of moving the same gigabyte through three toll roads. And each insists the others are the problem.Here’s what this video will do: expose where the hidden “multi‑cloud network tax” lives—in your latency, your architecture, and worst of all, your interconnect billing. The cure isn’t a shiny new service nobody’s tested. It’s understanding the physics—and the accounting—of data that crosses clouds. So let’s peel back the glossy marketing and watch what actually happens when Azure shakes hands with AWS and GCP.Section 1 – How Multi‑Cloud Became a ReligionMulti‑cloud didn’t start as a scam. It began as a survival instinct. After years of being told “stick with one vendor,” companies woke up one morning terrified of lock‑in. The fear spread faster than a zero‑day exploit. Boards demanded “vendor neutrality.” Architects began drawing diagrams full of arrows between logos. Thus was born the doctrine of hybrid everything.Executives adore the philosophy. It sounds responsible—diversified, risk‑aware, future‑proof. You tell investors you’re “cloud‑agnostic,” like someone bragging about not being tied down in a relationship. But under that independence statement is a complicated prenup: every cloud charges cross‑border alimony.Each platform is its own sovereign nation. Azure loves private VNets and ExpressRoute; AWS insists on VPCs and Direct Connect; GCP calls theirs VPC too, just to confuse everyone, then changes the exchange rate on you. You could think of these networks as countries with different visa policies, currencies, and customs agents. Sure, they all use IP packets, but each stamps your passport differently and adds a “service fee.”The “three passports problem” hits early. You spin up an app in Azure that needs to query a dataset in AWS and a backup bucket in GCP. You picture harmony; your network engineer pictures a migraine. Every request must leave one jurisdiction, pay export tax in egress charges, stand in a customs line at the interconnect, and be re‑inspected upon arrival. Repeat nightly if it’s automated.Now, you might say, “But competition keeps costs down, right?” In theory. In practice, each provider optimizes its pricing to discourage leaving. Data ingress is free—who doesn’t like imports?—but data egress is highway robbery. Once your workload moves significant bytes out of any cloud, the other two hit you with identical tolls for “routing convenience.”Here’s the best part—every CIO approves this grand multi‑cloud plan with champagne optimism. A few months later, the accountant quietly screams into a spreadsheet. The operational team starts seeing duplicate monitoring platforms, three separate incident dashboards, and a DNS federation setup that looks like abstract art. And yet, executives still talk about “best of breed,” while the engineers just rename error logs to “expected behavior.”This is the religion of multi‑cloud. It demands faith—faith that more providers equal more stability, faith that your team can untangle three IAM hierarchies, and faith that the next audit won’t reveal triple billing for the same dataset. The creed goes: thou shalt not be dependent on one cloud, even if it means dependence on three others.Why do smart companies fall for it? Leverage. Negotiation chips. If one provider raises prices, you threaten to move workloads. It’s a power play, but it ignores physics—moving terabytes across continents is not a threat; it’s a budgetary self‑immolation. You can’t bluff with latency.Picture it: a data analytics pipeline spanning all three hyperscalers. Azure holds the ingestion logic, AWS handles machine learning, and GCP stores archives. It looks sophisticated enough to print on investor decks. But underneath that graphic sits a mesh of ExpressRoute, Direct Connect, and Cloud Interconnect circuits—each billing by distance, capacity, and cheerfully vague “port fees.”Every extra gateway, every second provider monitoring tool, every overlapping CIDR range adds another line to the invoice and another failure vector. Multi‑cloud evolved from a strategy into superstition: if one cloud fails, at least another will charge us more to compensate.Here’s what most people miss: redundancy is free inside a single cloud region across availability zones. The moment you cross clouds, redundancy becomes replication, and replication becomes debt—paid in dollars and milliseconds.So yes, multi‑cloud offers theoretical freedom. But operationally, it’s the freedom to pay three ISPs, three security teams, and three accountants. We’ve covered why companies do it. Next, we’ll trace an actual packet’s journey between these digital borders and see precisely where that freedom turns into the tariff they don’t include in the keynote slides.Section 2 – The Hidden Architecture of a Multi‑Cloud HandshakeWhen Azure talks to AWS, it’s not a polite digital handshake between equals. It’s more like two neighboring countries agreeing to connect highways—but one drives on the left, the other charges per axle, and both send you a surprise invoice for “administrative coordination.”Here’s what actually happens. In Azure, your virtual network—the VNet—is bound to a single region. AWS uses a Virtual Private Cloud, or VPC, bound to its own region. GCP calls theirs a VPC too, as if a shared name could make them compatible. It cannot. Each one is a sovereign network space, guarded by its respective gateway devices and connected to its provider’s global backbone. To route data between them, you have to cross a neutral zone called a Point of Presence, or PoP. Picture an international airport where clouds trade packets instead of passengers.Microsoft’s ExpressRoute, Amazon’s Direct Connect, and Google’s Cloud Interconnect all terminate at these PoPs—carrier‑neutral facilities owned by colocation providers like Equinix or Megaport. These are the fiber hotels of the internet, racks of routers stacked like bunk beds for global data. Traffic leaves Azure’s pristine backbone, enters a dusty hallway of cross‑connect cables, and then climbs aboard AWS’s network on the other side. You pay each landlord separately: one for Microsoft’s port, one for Amazon’s port, and one for the privilege of existing between them.There’s no magic tunnel that silently merges networks. There’s only light—literal light—traveling through glass fibers, obeying physics while your budget evaporates. Each gigabyte takes the scenic route through bureaucracy and optics. Providers call it “private connectivity.” Accountants call it “billable.”Think of the journey like shipping containers across three customs offices. Your Azure app wants to send data to an AWS service. At departure, Azure charges for egress—the export tariff. The data is inspected at the PoP, where interconnect partners charge “handling fees.” Then AWS greets it with free import, but only after you’ve paid everyone else. Multiply this by nightly sync jobs, analytics pipelines, and cross‑cloud API calls, and you’ve built a miniature global trade economy powered by metadata and invoices.You do have options, allegedly. Option one: a site‑to‑site VPN. It’s cheap and quick—about as secure as taping two routers back‑to‑back and calling it enterprise connectivity. It tunnels through the public internet, wrapped in IPsec encryption, but you still rely on shared pathways where latency jitters like a caffeine addict. Speeds cap around a gigabit per second, assuming weather and whimsy cooperate. It’s good for backup or experimentation, terrible for production workloads that expect predictable throughput.Option two: private interconnects like ExpressRoute and Direct Connect. Those give you deterministic performance at comically nondeterministic pricing. You’re renting physical ports at the PoP, provisioning circuits from multiple telecom carriers, and managing Microsoft‑ or Amazon‑side gateway resources just to create what feels like a glorified Ethernet cable. FastPath, the Azure feature that lets traffic bypass a gateway to cut latency, is a fine optimization—like removing a tollbooth from an otherwise expensive freeway. But it doesn’t erase the rest of the toll road.Now layer in topology. A proper enterprise network uses a hub‑and‑spoke model. The hub contains your core resources, security appliances, and outbound routes. The spokes—individual VNets or VPCs—peer with the hub to gain access. Add multiple clouds, and each one now has its own hub. Connect these hubs together, and you stack delay upon delay, like nesting dolls again but made of routers. Every hop adds microseconds and management overhead. Engineers eventually build “super‑hubs” or “transit centers” to simplify routing, which sounds tidy until billing flows through it like water through a leaky pipe.You can route through SD‑WAN overlays to mask the complexity, but that’s cosmetic surgery, not anatomy. The packets still travel the same geographic distance, bound by fiber realities. Electricity moves near the speed of light; invoices move at the speed of “end of month.”Let’s not forget DNS. Every handshake assumes both clouds can resolve each other’s private names. Without consistent name resolution, TLS connections collapse in confusion. Engineers end up forwarding DNS across these circuits, juggling conditional forwarders and private zones like circus performers. You now have three authoritative sources of truth, each insisting it’s the main character.And resilience—never a single connection. ExpressRoute circuits come in redundant pairs, but both live in the same PoP
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/m365-show-modern-work-security-and-productivity-with-microsoft-365--6704921/support.
Follow us on:
LInkedIn
Substack
