<story><title>Cloud Egress Costs</title><url>https://getdeploying.com/reference/data-egress</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zer00eyz</author><text>No.&lt;p&gt;Everyone knew what the costs were going in.&lt;p&gt;AWS, cloud was NEVER the cheaper solution. It was never faster, it was never better.&lt;p&gt;It was easier, and easier came with a price. Like lambs to the slaughter lots of people embraced it. Amazon is a profitable company because of it.</text></item><item><author>quickthrower2</author><text>So an anticompetitive practice.</text></item><item><author>amluto</author><text>&amp;gt; other than: it makes migrating to competitors cost-prohibitive in a subset of cases&lt;p&gt;My theory: it forces third party services into the same cloud.&lt;p&gt;Suppose you use AWS and you want to pay a third party SaaS provider for some service involving moderate-to-large amounts of data.  Here’s one of many examples:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.snowflake.com&amp;#x2F;en&amp;#x2F;data-cloud&amp;#x2F;pricing-options&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.snowflake.com&amp;#x2F;en&amp;#x2F;data-cloud&amp;#x2F;pricing-options&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;And look at this remarkable choice: you get to pick AWS, Azure, or GCP!  Snowflake is paying a &lt;i&gt;lot&lt;/i&gt; of money to host on those clouds, and they’re passing those costs on to customers.&lt;p&gt;Snowflake is big. They have lots of engineers. They are obviously cloud-agnostic: they already support three clouds. It would surely be &lt;i&gt;much&lt;/i&gt; cheaper to operate a physical facility, and they could plausibly offer better performance (because NVMe is amazing), and they could split the cost savings with customers.  But they don’t, and my theory is that egress from customers to Snowflake would negate any cost savings, and the &lt;i&gt;variable&lt;/i&gt; nature of the costs would scare away customers.&lt;p&gt;So my theory is that the ways that customers &lt;i&gt;avoid&lt;/i&gt; egress fees makes the major clouds a lot of money.  IMO regulators should take a very careful look at this, but it’s an excellent business decision on the parts of the clouds.</text></item><item><author>PreInternet01</author><text>The cost of egress traffic is a &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; good reason for many organizations to not fully migrate to a cloud provider anytime soon. And since, unlike with storage costs, there doesn&amp;#x27;t seem to be an actual &lt;i&gt;reason&lt;/i&gt; (other than: it makes migrating to competitors cost-prohibitive in a subset of cases), that seems kind of... weird?&lt;p&gt;Small example: an actual company I do some work for is in the business of delivering creative assets to distributors. This results in an egress of around 180TB per month, which is, on average just, around 500Mb&amp;#x2F;s.&lt;p&gt;So, this company currently operates 2 racks in commercial data centers, linked via 10Gb&amp;#x2F;s Ethernet-over-DWDM, with 2x512Mb&amp;#x2F;s and 1x1Gb&amp;#x2F;s Internet uplinks per DC. Each rack has 2 generic-OEM servers with ~64 AMD Zen cores, 1&amp;#x2F;2TB RAM, ~8TB NVMe and ~100TB SAS RAID6 storage per node.&lt;p&gt;Just the cost-savings over egress on AWS is enough to justify that setup, including the cost of an engineer to keep it all up and running (even though the effort required for that turns out to be minimal).&lt;p&gt;So, are cloud providers ignoring a significant market here, or is the markup on their current customers lucrative enough?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>morningsam</author><text>There have been other instances in which exit fees, which is what this amounts to, were considered anticompetitive, e.g. [1] (although this was settled so there is no ruling).
Google itself has started to waive egress costs for GCP customers leaving the platform last month, which, according to some sources, is simply a direct consequence of new EU legislation (Data Act) [2], but according to others is in anticipation of wider-reaching EU antitrust investigations [3].&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.agriculturedive.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;koch-foods-antitrust-chicken-poultry-termination-fee-doj&amp;#x2F;699592&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.agriculturedive.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;koch-foods-antitrust-ch...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.computerweekly.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;366566360&amp;#x2F;Googles-data-egress-offer-no-such-thing-as-a-free-migration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.computerweekly.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;366566360&amp;#x2F;Googles-data-e...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[3]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.min.io&amp;#x2F;googles-new-egress-policy&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.min.io&amp;#x2F;googles-new-egress-policy&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Cloud Egress Costs</title><url>https://getdeploying.com/reference/data-egress</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zer00eyz</author><text>No.&lt;p&gt;Everyone knew what the costs were going in.&lt;p&gt;AWS, cloud was NEVER the cheaper solution. It was never faster, it was never better.&lt;p&gt;It was easier, and easier came with a price. Like lambs to the slaughter lots of people embraced it. Amazon is a profitable company because of it.</text></item><item><author>quickthrower2</author><text>So an anticompetitive practice.</text></item><item><author>amluto</author><text>&amp;gt; other than: it makes migrating to competitors cost-prohibitive in a subset of cases&lt;p&gt;My theory: it forces third party services into the same cloud.&lt;p&gt;Suppose you use AWS and you want to pay a third party SaaS provider for some service involving moderate-to-large amounts of data.  Here’s one of many examples:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.snowflake.com&amp;#x2F;en&amp;#x2F;data-cloud&amp;#x2F;pricing-options&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.snowflake.com&amp;#x2F;en&amp;#x2F;data-cloud&amp;#x2F;pricing-options&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;And look at this remarkable choice: you get to pick AWS, Azure, or GCP!  Snowflake is paying a &lt;i&gt;lot&lt;/i&gt; of money to host on those clouds, and they’re passing those costs on to customers.&lt;p&gt;Snowflake is big. They have lots of engineers. They are obviously cloud-agnostic: they already support three clouds. It would surely be &lt;i&gt;much&lt;/i&gt; cheaper to operate a physical facility, and they could plausibly offer better performance (because NVMe is amazing), and they could split the cost savings with customers.  But they don’t, and my theory is that egress from customers to Snowflake would negate any cost savings, and the &lt;i&gt;variable&lt;/i&gt; nature of the costs would scare away customers.&lt;p&gt;So my theory is that the ways that customers &lt;i&gt;avoid&lt;/i&gt; egress fees makes the major clouds a lot of money.  IMO regulators should take a very careful look at this, but it’s an excellent business decision on the parts of the clouds.</text></item><item><author>PreInternet01</author><text>The cost of egress traffic is a &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; good reason for many organizations to not fully migrate to a cloud provider anytime soon. And since, unlike with storage costs, there doesn&amp;#x27;t seem to be an actual &lt;i&gt;reason&lt;/i&gt; (other than: it makes migrating to competitors cost-prohibitive in a subset of cases), that seems kind of... weird?&lt;p&gt;Small example: an actual company I do some work for is in the business of delivering creative assets to distributors. This results in an egress of around 180TB per month, which is, on average just, around 500Mb&amp;#x2F;s.&lt;p&gt;So, this company currently operates 2 racks in commercial data centers, linked via 10Gb&amp;#x2F;s Ethernet-over-DWDM, with 2x512Mb&amp;#x2F;s and 1x1Gb&amp;#x2F;s Internet uplinks per DC. Each rack has 2 generic-OEM servers with ~64 AMD Zen cores, 1&amp;#x2F;2TB RAM, ~8TB NVMe and ~100TB SAS RAID6 storage per node.&lt;p&gt;Just the cost-savings over egress on AWS is enough to justify that setup, including the cost of an engineer to keep it all up and running (even though the effort required for that turns out to be minimal).&lt;p&gt;So, are cloud providers ignoring a significant market here, or is the markup on their current customers lucrative enough?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DeathArrow</author><text>&amp;gt;It was easier, and easier came with a price.&lt;p&gt;I kind of doubt it&amp;#x27;s easier. If you use your own servers you need some stuff to manage them. If you use cloud, you need some cloud engineers to manage your cloud infrastructure. On top of that, if your developers use cloud APIs and frameworks, they have to learn that.</text></comment>