The London Internet Exchange (LINX) has become an official provider of the Microsoft Azure Peering Service.
The service is now available at LINX in London and is accessible to networks connected to LINX’s LON1 interconnection platform. Users can opt-in to additional peering service telemetry through the Azure portal.
“We are really pleased to be able to offer this service to our community. We are pioneers for Internet peering within the telecoms sector and to be a Microsoft official partner for their peering service is a great achievement," said Mike Hellers, product development manager for LINX.
LINX has offered internet peering solutions for more than 25 years and has expanded interconnection services in recent years to include cloud access, closed user group solutions, colocation and more.
The exchange offers a dual LAN interconnection facility that spans 16 data centre points of presence and has regional hubs in Manchester, Scotland, Wales and Northern Virginia in the US.
"We are pioneers for internet peering within the telecoms sector and to be a Microsoft official partner for their peering service is a great achievement,” said Hellers.
“With this new partnership, we can deliver even more value to our current member base, while also welcoming new networks from the enterprise market to LINX as we provide them with a trusted and resilient route to their Microsoft SaaS applications,” he added.
Earlier this month, Telstra was revealed as a carrier for the service and there are plans to roll out services to Europe and the US in 2022.
This new partnership, though, will allow the current LINX base and new networks to establish direct peering with Microsoft and access public Azure services using LINX infrastructure.
Microsoft says that the “Azure Peering Service is a networking service that enhances customer connectivity to Microsoft cloud services such as Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, software as a service (SaaS), Azure, or any Microsoft services accessible via the public internet”.
