In recent months, the big three cloud vendors — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — have relaxed their egress fees, which are a tax of sorts that the cloud companies charge customers to move their data to another vendor.
“In the original cloud world, the three major cloud vendors were really fighting to try to build what felt like walled gardens, and as long as you built on top of them, everything was great.
Cloud customers looking to switch providers will need to be retained through innovative and accessible features now that the punishment of egress fees is being phased out,” Seseri said.
David Linthicum, a longtime cloud consultant, says that while these recent announcements are a pleasant PR move, he warns folks to review their bills carefully because egress fees aren’t the only problem.
What are we paying for the networking fees, the egress fees, all the other hidden fees that come along with what people call junk fees that come from the cloud vendors?”But this may not affect startups as much as larger enterprise customers.
Microsoft has revealed that it too will allow business customers to transfer data out of its Azure cloud infrastructure with no so-called “egress fees” attached, following hot on the heels of similar moves by cloud rivals AWS and Google.
The latter of these announced it was ditching egress fees in January, followed by AWS earlier this month.
Similar to rivals including AWS, Microsoft did already allow customers to transfer 100GB of data out of Azure each month for free.
This is notable, because a lot of companies will want to use some Azure services, without having to go all-in on it.
So data transfers from other Azure services, such as the Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN), will still include the standard charges.
Google today announced that it’ll stop charging Google Cloud customers a fee to migrate their data to another cloud provider or on-premise datacenter, effective immediately.
Customers using Google Cloud services including BigQuery, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Datastore, Filestore, Spanner and Persistent Disk are eligible for free transfers out of Google Cloud — but must first apply for approval through a form.
Only once an approved customer’s data has been transferred out of Google Cloud and they’ve terminated their cloud written agreement will the data transfer fee will be waived (via a bill credit).
According to an IDC survey, 99% of cloud storage users have incurred egress fees averaging 6% of their cloud storage costs.
In 2018, Cloudflare launched the Bandwidth Alliance, a group of companies pledging to reduce or eliminate data egress fees.
