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Free data transfer out to internet when moving out of AWS
- drpossum 3y agoThe cynic in me came to the comments to get the real story and was not disappointed.
- Justsignedup 3y agoIt gets to the meat and potatoes at the end. They were forced to do it, so they put a positive spin on it as if they're doing it out of the goodness of their heart. Still a positive, but man, that marketing messaging. I give props to the team who wrote that.
- Max-Ganz-II 3y agoI specialize in Amazon Redshift. Speaking for and only for Amazon Redshift, as I have little knowledge of other AWS services, I hold AWS's blogs, messaging, Support communications, TAMs, the lot, as relentlessly positive and to my eye deliberately and knowingly obfuscating all weakness. I regard information from AWS regarding Redshift as safe to read when and only when you already know what's going on / the underlying truth. Otherwise you will be misled, and to your cost at AWS's benefit. By the sounds of it, the messaging over this change in data policy is the same.
- therealcamino 3y ago> "safe to read when and only when you already know what's going on / the underlying truth" I've never read AWS blogs before but that was exactly my feeling after reading the linked article on "fair software principles" or something. You can tell that somebody has a hobby horse they're riding, and it's only because it's in their financial self-interest, but unless you already knew what the actual issue was before you read the blog, you're still going to be clueless afterwards!
- Havoc 3y agoAt least they acknowledged it in passing Googles equivalent announcement was all flowery bullshit making it seem like a voluntary action
- AtlasBarfed 3y agoThat, friends, is a "tell". It shows they know they are raking people over the coals with intentional, preconceived illegal anticompetitive behavior written into their documentation. Right from the playbook, they have a sweet marketing wrapup for when they have to walk back their preconceived illegal behavior to the minimum directed border. Tech corps especially now do this as standard operating procedure (I mean Uber had entire divisions and armies of lawyers to bypass/obfuscate/delay imposition of local cab and labor laws). It's why you can't trust them with AI, personal information, AI, customer service, AI, following laws, AI, or anything. I know Google in the heydey of the aughts wasn't as "good" as they tried to be, but at least the "do no evil" kind of kept them in check to some degree. But at some point they bought the corporation-formerly-known-as-DoubleClick, and I think in retrospect that was the beginning of the end of functional idealism in the internet.
- Justsignedup 3y agoThe other comment mentioned how google didn't even acknowledge why they did it. I have to say, talking to AWS and GCP, the AWS marketing, onboarding, and support arm are far far far far far superior to google's. In fact they are so far apart that our management has blatantly discarded google as even an option for moving our infra over because of how terrible our interactions have been. I'm all for de-throning the king, but it ain't gonna be done by the court jester. In any case, point is, AWS has good strategy where it matters most.
- pm90 3y agoCan you give specific examples of what was lacking? Ive only had positive experiences with GCP.
- Justsignedup 3y agoWe want to migrate to it: "Okay cool! We'll sign you up! Good luck!" vs "We have a migration strategy, and partners who can help you lift-and-ship or at least consult to get you a lay of the land. Try these companies and see if you're interested, and we'll help you along the way." Google is -- thanks for reaching out, you can certainly sign up and figure it all out, here's a few books! Amazon -- things are complex, and here's a few books to read, but I know you don't have a few years so here's some people who know how to do this, and we've ironed out how most companies succeed in migrating. Also he's a ton of incentive to move to amazon-exclusive services.
- beoberha 3y agoGood for them, but sounds like there was a gun to their head. I didn’t realize any law like that had passed. I guess it’s nice of them to extend it to the whole world ;)
- RoyTyrell 3y agoI suppose its both to look like they're benevolent and to "force" everyone else to follow suit - at least for MS and Google.
- weikju 3y ago> The waiver on data transfer out to the internet charges also follows the direction set by the European Data Act and is available to all AWS customers around the world and from any AWS Region. Thank you, EU, on behalf of the rest of the world
- lelanthran 3y agoWell waddya know... Looks like sometimes regulations do work better than the invisible hand of the free market. Reality: the invisible hand is simply a fist made up of all members of a cartel.
- dotnet00 3y agoThe free market was working, in the sense that there are decent options which don't use egress fees as lock-in. The issue was that the invisible hand is too slow and involves too much chaos when strong network effects (and related lock-in) become involved. Such effects weaken the presumption that competitors can be easily switched to.
- hkt 3y ago> Such effects weaken the presumption that competitors can be easily switched to. Plus, the egress fees were too damn high
- shrubble 3y agoAmazon, Google and Azure are anything but free market; they have been getting subsidies and abatements in the 10s of billions all along.
- mikelitoris 3y agoInvisible hand works in perfect markets which never exist in reality. It is used as a smokescreen by the people with insane amounts of money who can bend the rules to their will, to convince the rest of the people how the economy works. Like most of economics
- artwr 3y agoOne of the other question is whether you have to delete all data / close your account 60 days after you transfer out without fee: https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1765102310563500521 https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1765102310563500521 Probably obeying the letter of the European Data Act, but obviously not great if true.
- LelouBil 3y agoNope > We don’t require you to close your account or change your relationship with AWS in any way. You’re welcome to come back at any time. We will, of course, apply additional scrutiny if the same AWS account applies multiple times for free DTO.
- Daviey 3y agoThen compare that statement with their FAQ,https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#Data_transfer_fees_when_moving_all_data_off_AWS https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#Data_transfer_fees_when_mov... > After your move away from AWS services, within the 60-day period, you must delete all remaining data and workloads from your AWS account, or you can close your AWS account.
- rescbr 3y agoIf you manage to delete everything and make the billing to be zero dollars, then there's no need to close the account... In many cases, this is way harder than it sounds.
- renewiltord 3y agoIf someone manages that, they're a god.
- ralphist 3y agoBeginner here, but shouldn't `terraform destroy` make this very easy? Assuming you deploy everything with IaC.
- ukuina 3y agoNote that this is not free egress to premises, only "out to internet".
- sgjohnson 3y agoon-prem is still “the internet”
- ukuina 3y agoI mean this is not fee-free unlimited egress back to prem, but a one-time export of your data with manual approval. This does not let you build big-data workflows around temporary use of EC2.
- sgjohnson 3y agoNor it is intended for you to. It’s meant for situations where you intend to leave AWS for good, not spin up another EC2 instance when you need it, generate terabytes of data and then transfer it out for free.
- eastdakota 3y agoBaby steps toward truly free egress.
- supriyo-biswas 3y agoIsn’t this a bad faith interpretation of the EU law, by providing free egress when exiting AWS (and GCP)? The law mandates egress costs should either be free or not exceed the costs encountered by the cloud provider.
- foofie 3y agoWhat do you mean "bad faith"? Can you elaborate?
- dragonwriter 3y agoThe law mandates egress to be free or at provider cost when two data processing services are used in parallel; AWS, OTOH, provides it free (better than is minimally required!) and to customers not protected by the law at issue (also more than required!) but only when migrating off of AWS, not when using AWS alongside another service, so (assuming it continues to charge much more than their cost for all other egress) is not actually complying with the law outside of a very narrow subset of the cases where it applies. This is a particularly meaningless gesture in the direction of compliance from a provider dominant across so many categories of cloud services as AWS is -- the whole point of the "in parallel" requirement in the law is, I would assume, to prevent the mega-cloud providers (AWS, mainly, but also Azure and GCP) from being able to effectively lock customers to monopolize areas of cloud services where their specific offerings are weak by the egress fees of their dominant offerings which would be used alongside them. "Free only when you are transferring out to leave our platform" doesn't address this lock-in at all.
- bnprks 3y agoI hope this is just the start of egress fee changes in response to the European Data Act. Taking a look at other parts of the law's text [1], I think this change related to Article 25, but Article 34 section 2 is what really stands out to me: > Where a data processing service is being used in parallel with another data processing service, the providers of data processing services may impose data egress charges, but only for the purpose of passing on egress costs incurred, without exceeding such costs. Hopefully this article doesn't end up with exploitable loopholes. Bringing down AWS, GCP, and Azure egress costs to market rates could majorly help reduce cloud lock-in gradually without having to close your entire account. [1]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:L_202302854&qid=1709707090487#d1e3746-1-1 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:...
- usr1106 3y agoSo do we know how much are the egress costs for AWS? In other words how much AWS is overcharging? I guess they make every effort / creative bookkeeping trick to exaggerate their egress costs and it will take years until EU completes their investigation and fines them and more years until courts have had their final word.
- shrubble 3y agoI have seen a rack with power and 10Gig ethernet advertised for $700 per month; so my guess is that Amazon pays less than 25 cents per Mbps per month and in some cases, nothing.
- matt-p 3y agoWe can safely assume that almost 100% of their traffic is settlement free peered so obsensibly 'free'. They do however haul the traffic on their own backbone extensively before handing it over (which will be part of the reason for the extremely high level of settlement free). That is extensive and costly ; they lease fibres in subsea cables and in some cases part own them. Similar for terrestrial fibre. This wraps the world, so the fixed cost of that is super high, but the unit costs would be tiny. All in I'd be astonished if the weighted average for say Europe was more than 0.11 cents per GB if they are charging you 2 cents that's ~20x cost, if it's 8 cents...
- blinding-streak 3y agoIs this AWS feeling pressure from GCP's similar move? https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/11/google-vows-not-to-charge-data-transfer-fees-when-cloud-customers-exit.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/11/google-vows-not-to-charge-da...
- gerogerke 3y agoThis is GCP and AWS feeling pressure from EU legislation.
- andrewstuart 3y agoSo move out to a cloud that doesn’t charge egress. Unless of course you went all in on IAM, Lambda, API gateway etc etc instead of just running software on Linux. In which case you’ll need to stay.
- pinkgolem 3y agoTbh,I don't miss a lot from AWS, but IAM is pretty cool for auth between services and I have not found a comparable on premise solution
- OJFord 3y agoAs far as AWS 'koolaid' goes, you picked the stuff that's actually pretty useful and sensible to use. (But also fairly portable anyway? The big ones at least have pretty comparable solutions.)
- usr1106 3y agoI have still lived in the obviously false belief that AWS charges for every egress byte (regular operation not take out, except Lightsail, which always had rather large quota included.) Now they claim every account has big free tier. When has that changed? Edit: My search engine found December 2021: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/11/aws-price-reduction-data-transfers-internet/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/11/aws-price...
- usr1106 3y agoReplying to myself: Of course these price reductions why they suddenly charge for IPv4 addresses. To my understanding AWS does not suffer from scarcity, they have huge pools. At least for customers using a lot of egress the charging per address is probably cheaper. For small businesses with relatively little businesses but not so slim deployments with addresses hanging around on many little used or even forgotten resources it's the other way round. Edit: I had already forgotten the 42% price raise hitting myself on my personal Lightsail instance in May.
- fmajid 3y agoThe market price for IPv4 addresses has peaked: https://www.sidn.nl/en/news-and-blogs/are-we-past-peak-ipv4 https://www.sidn.nl/en/news-and-blogs/are-we-past-peak-ipv4 Amazon’s move seems to be motivated by pure greed and quasi-monopoly complacency.
- ckdarby 3y agoMaybe, but I don't think so. The market is simply going through a cycle. With such a high price per IP there are a lot of organizations finally putting in the effort of cleaning up their space and selling off blocks. I know a company that was doing consolidated and clean up for an aggregation of freeing 200k worth of space. They were looking at adding $15-35M to their pockets. IPv6 support is still not where it needs to be. Look at the clouds. There are many services that still are only IPv4 or partial ipv6 support. Just check back in 1-3 years and the price will have recovered.
- hinkley 3y agoThese aren’t the rates Amazon charges for user hitting their servers right? How do they even get away with charging more for data transfers of a certain type?
- Lucasoato 3y agoIf AWS cut most of the egress fees, not only by asking to their support, that would be the greatest thing ever happening in the cloud computing space. A lot of multi-cloud architectures are unlikely to be designed because the egress fees are killing them. Imagine if we could host some of the infra in AWS, using S3, but keeping some machines on Hetzner, while calling other APIs hosted in azure… one day it will happen :’)
- renonce 3y agoYou dont need to wait for that one day. Right now I’m using cloud servers from hetzner and store data in Backblaze S3 and train models on Lambda or even vast.ai.
- frant-hartm 3y agoYou can, but one has to be careful with the transfers. If not you could incur ridiculous costs. And some architectures are still prohibited - any replicated database across cloud vendors - imagine Cassandra hosted across AWS and Azure to protect against one cloud vendor outage.
- Falimonda 3y agoCan you reference where it says that regular, day-to-day egress between clouds is going to be covered by this recent change? All the articles I've found so far imply that this free egress will be granted on a case-by-case basis, for egress that is not considered operational data, but rather explicitly for migrating out of AWS for the purpose of terminating your relationship with AWS.
- switch007 3y agoIn reference to the EU legislating, Amazon will just seek/get revenue gains elsewhere. It won’t be immediate, it won’t be obvious, but it will happen. Take EU261, which caused issues for smaller airlines, leading to less competition, increased fares. There are also claims it’s affecting safety [0]. I’m not against EU261 per se, but it’s healthy to be critical of large institutions like the EU. People, I find, cheer about new EU legislation but then forget to look think about any consequences a few years down the road. Where is the EU’s own critical evaluation and performance review of EU261, especially given it’s been heavily revised through case law over the years? (FWIW, I live in Europe, I’m generally pro EU, but it’s not all roses) [0] (obviously some bias given it’s the ERAA) https://www.eraa.org/sites/default/files/era_eu261_study_brochure_final_version_26sep.pdf https://www.eraa.org/sites/default/files/era_eu261_study_bro...
- zaphirplane 3y agoRight it shifts prices around, but reduced the lock-in. No regulator cares that Mercedes are more expensive than Kia. Regulators will be interested if Mercedes charges 30k to reset the car for resale or some other silly analogy
- mythhabit 3y agoBefore EU261, the passanger took on the risk for delays and cancelations mainly due to the operational performance of the airline. After, the airlines now directly take on some of that risk. I'm of the opinion, that if airlines did this well in general, or the industry had a reasonable solution in place, such regulation would not have been made in the first place. So, if it caused issues for smaller airlines and generally increase in prices, is that not a clear indication that the smaller airlines do not have sufficiently capability to handle it, and that prices was too low?
- NorwegianDude 3y ago> Over 90 percent of our customers already incur no data transfer expenses out of AWS because we provide 100 gigabytes per month free from AWS Regions to the internet. Damn, that's a lot of tiny customers. 100 GB per month is less than what many use on their phone during a month. So basically, most people using AWS is definitely people who don't need it to scale.
- h1fra 3y agoYou can have terabytes of data for internal purposes, analytics, etc. That never moves out of the data center except when you want to migrate.
- bombcar 3y agoThe bigger you are the less data you might have to export - because all your tools are inside the fence. Small companies download reports/analytics/files from X and upload them to Y, etc, big companies do it all inside.
- rumsbums 3y ago> The bigger you are the less data you might have to export You're strictly limiting yourself to companies that provide no internet-facing services?
- Hamuko 3y agoMy personal AWS account is just for storing some archive files in S3, which incurs a $0.02/month bill and which Amazon can't be bothered to charge.
- alexdns 3y agoIts not that they are not bothered to charge its just that cc processing fees are higher than what you are being billed. It will accumulate and they will charge it when it reaches a certain amount
- DogLover_ 3y agoCloudflare have always had this. I wonder how this will affect them.
- Tabular-Iceberg 3y ago“We believe…” No, you don’t.
- gtirloni 3y agoLooks like something they are being forced to do. Otherwise, if they really cared about their customers, they'd just lower outgoing data transfer pricing at all times and not only when you're leaving.
- uptownfunk 3y agoAFAIK this is pretty much the moat collapsing on big cloud. That said you still have to contact them for it so not truly free movement. Once it becomes truly free to move data out things will get interesting. The stock market didn’t really seem to care that much which was surprising.
- ckdarby 3y agoI think AWS doesn't truly care. They've probably internally planned for the day when egress cost billing would be chipped away and have been planning. It is a total cash cow and huge boast on margins for them, but they've been taking that money over the years and diversifying into managed services. The managed services are expensive, but boy do they work well. Over the last couple years been running +100 each of managed elastic searches, RDS, and firehouse with minimal to no issues.
- bklyn11201 3y agoExactly correct. AWS has a giant suite of services, and if they are forced to reduce egress charges, they would raise prices on other services to keep their margins consistent. The market knows this and thus why the market doesn't react to non-news like this. An interesting question: why does AWS charge so much for egress knowing that it could dissuade some currently-on-prem use cases? It definitely forces optimization, use of CDNs, compression, etc. Previously it likely reduced transfers to another provider, but as the parent alludes to, the use of managed services makes sticking to AWS much more likely. What else?
- uptownfunk 3y agoBecause eventually there is no difference in managed service from gcp oci msft, so when data egress cost doesn’t matter you can use any providers service. The margins will get worn away since there’s no longer high switching cost.
- amluto 3y ago> they would raise prices on other services to keep their margins consistent. The market knows this and thus why the market doesn't react to non-news like this. I’m unconvinced. A lot of money is spent on third party services (think Snowflake, but there are a ton) where the third party service is offered in AWS, GCP, and Azure. There is no on-the-Internet option. If egress fees go away, on-the-Internet becomes appealing, and there goes a lot of revenue. If fees for other services go up, on-the-Internet becomes even more appealing.
- paxys 3y agoBig tech firms – moving to another cloud provider will cost you $50M in egress fees. EU – actually, it must be free. Big tech firms – free and open competition is integral to society, and we value freedom of choice over anything else, so of course data transfer is free for our valued customers.
- SturgeonsLaw 3y agoMore and more it feels like the EU is the only thing keeping the bastards honest
- rumsbums 3y agoNot sure where you're seeing honesty..
- astanway 3y agoGoogle ostensibly offers this as well. However - I’m in the middle of moving us to Azure and I have more details on the Google deal: you only have 60 days to complete the migration and then you must terminate your billing account. It’s a total window dressing of an offer and completely unrealistic for any reasonably large organization to use. Malicious compliance at its finest and I hope they get sued by the EU for it until they make it a more reasonable offer.
- zx8080 3y agoWill this move make providers increase other prices?