Prerequisites

Before diving in, make sure you have the right accounts, tools, and credentials. This section also covers cost expectations so there are no surprises.

Tip

This walkthrough targets the ** AWS AWS
Amazon Web Services — the cloud platform used throughout this walkthrough. ↔ Google Cloud Google Cloud
Google Cloud Platform — the cloud provider connected to AWS via Interconnect multicloud in this walkthrough. ** path — the only GA partner for AWS Interconnect – multicloud as of this writing (April 2026). Azure and OCI support is announced but not yet available.

Accounts and permissions

You need an AWS AWS
Amazon Web Services — the cloud platform used throughout this walkthrough. account with permissions for Direct Connect, EC2, VPC VPC
Virtual Private Cloud — an isolated private network. Both AWS and GCP use VPCs. The interconnect peers the two VPCs for private routing. , iam , and AWS Interconnect – multicloud AWS Interconnect – multicloud
AWS Interconnect – multicloud — a managed private connectivity service that connects Amazon VPCs directly to VPCs on other cloud providers. GA with Google Cloud as of April 2026. .

You also need a GCP GCP
Google Cloud Platform — the cloud provider connected to AWS via Interconnect multicloud in this walkthrough. project with billing enabled and these APIs enabled:

• Compute Engine API
• Network Connectivity API (networkconnectivity.googleapis.com)

gcloud services enable compute.googleapis.com networkconnectivity.googleapis.com \
  --project=YOUR_GCP_PROJECT_ID

Tools

Tool	Version	Used for
TERRAFORM TERRAFORM HashiCorp Terraform — infrastructure-as-code tool used to provision the base AWS and GCP resources in this demo.	>= 1.5.0	Base infrastructure
AWS CLI	v2 ≥ 2.34.43	SSM SSM AWS Systems Manager Session Manager — provides shell access to EC2 instances without a public IP or SSH key, using VPC interface endpoints. sessions; aws interconnect status checks
Google Cloud SDK	latest	Transport Transport GCP Transport — a Network Connectivity resource created via `gcloud beta network-connectivity transports create`. Represents the GCP side of the cross-cloud interconnect link. + peering (beta commands)
Session Manager plugin	latest	SSH-less EC2 access

Caution

AWS CLI builds older than 2.34.43 lack the interconnect namespace (Found invalid choice 'interconnect'). Legacy AWS CLI v1 (pip install awscli) never includes it.

Authentication

# AWS
aws sts get-caller-identity

# GCP — Terraform uses Application Default Credentials (ADC)
gcloud auth application-default login
gcloud config set project YOUR_GCP_PROJECT_ID
gcloud auth application-default set-quota-project YOUR_GCP_PROJECT_ID

TERRAFORM TERRAFORM
HashiCorp Terraform — infrastructure-as-code tool used to provision the base AWS and GCP resources in this demo. and the Google provider read credentials from ADC ADC
Application Default Credentials — the credential chain used by Google Cloud client libraries and Terraform to authenticate. Set via `gcloud auth application-default login`. , not from gcloud config. After gcloud config set project, align the ADC quota project to the same GCP project — otherwise you may see a mismatch warning and hit unexpected quota/billing issues:

WARNING: Your active project does not match the quota project in your local
Application Default Credentials file.

Run set-quota-project whenever you switch GCP projects for this demo.

Region pairing

Interconnect Interconnect
AWS Interconnect – multicloud — a managed private connectivity service that connects Amazon VPCs directly to VPCs on other cloud providers. GA with Google Cloud as of April 2026. is region-to-region. Pick a supported pair before editing terraform.tfvars.

Tip

Authoritative list: AWS Interconnect regional availability (GCP mirror: paired locations).

Caution

ap-southeast-2 (Sydney) is not a supported Interconnect pair. The nearest APAC option is ap-southeast-1 ↔ asia-southeast1 (Singapore).

The following region pairs are available:

AWS Region	GCP Region
ap-southeast-1	asia-southeast1
us-east-1	us-east4
us-west-2	us-west1
us-west-1	us-west2
eu-west-2	europe-west2
eu-central-1	europe-west3

List available GCP remote profiles for your target GCP region:

gcloud beta network-connectivity transports remote-profiles list \
  --region=asia-southeast1