After Google Cloud and AWS moved to abolish cloud egress fees, Microsoft Azure couldn’t refrain from doing the same. From now on, all three major hyperscalers make it possible to pull all data away from their respective cloud platform for free. The catch is that only departing customers get this option. But that’s not what egress fees are all about.
When you boil it all down, a “cloud egress” is simply the act of pulling data away from a cloud environment. That extraction can guide such data either to other cloud services or to a private cloud. Importantly, an egress of this kind is not necessarily a one-time event. In order to allow for a multi-cloud strategy (the adoption of multiple cloud environments simultaneously), this form of outbound traffic is an essential feature. As Google Cloud puts it, “the primary goal of a multicloud strategy is to give you flexibility to operate with the best computing environment for each workload.”
Microsoft, AWS and Google Cloud don’t seem to have that application in mind. Instead, they all continue to make it a lot more advantageous to stay within their own cloud in a variety of ways. One recent example is the significant cost savings that apply to those running Office and Windows within Microsoft Azure instead of through an external party, which several European cloud players complained about last week.
Free egress only for a full-blown exit
Instead, this trio opts for a narrower definition of cloud egress. Egress charges are waived only if you perform a one-time data extraction. This is immediately evident in Google Cloud’s rhetoric, where it refers to the newly enabled practice as “cloud switching.” The company railed against competitors’ shortcomings in that regard, which hinder interoperability. High egress costs allegedly kept customers artificially within the walled gardens of AWS and Azure.
The prevailing norm until early this year was that organizations could egress up to 100GB per month for free from any cloud environment. Google Cloud later increased this to 200GB p/m. AWS notes that more than 90 percent of its customers would never have faced egress charges anyway, as they do not even reach the 100GB maximum at any point. We hasten to add that the cloud giants have helped ensure only a fraction would actually exceed the established maximum. If an organization incurs prohibitive costs for exceeding this defined norm, they’ll do everything in their power to avoid hitting the limit. It doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t prefer to routinely extract more data. They just can’t, realistically speaking.
Either way, the current “free” egress charges are a one-time option. In AWS’ case, they promise not to cancel the account in question, but the credits required for free egress can only be requested once. There will be countermeasures to avoid exploiting any loopholes. Microsoft goes a step further by only awarding these credits when all subscriptions have been discontinued. Within Google Cloud, an egress means that all cloud services for the account in question cease. You either walk into the sunset or continue to pay, regardless of the provider.
Is the EU Data Act meant to function differently?
The three cloud players claim to have done away with egress fees to accommodate their customers. However, external factors are also at play. The European Data Act, effective January 11, 2024, is motivation enough. By September 12, 2025, all cloud companies active inside the EU have to facilitate vendor switching or a move to an on-prem environment. This aims to fight against vendor lock-in, something which unattractive egress costs contributed to.
However, the idealistic worlf of a fully enabled multi-cloud approach is still not possible in practice. The limits on routine egress remain 100 or 200 GB (depending on the cloud player in question). It seems that cloud players need only comply with the rather limited rules set up by the Data Act. Now that the three largest cloud platforms have made their move, those regulations appear to have been met. However, that is not enough to deliver on the customer choice they promise to allow for. For that, data must be able to flow back and forth without barriers, with, at most, reasonable compensation for consumption costs. We are a long way from that.
Also read: Cloud deals and GenAI drive Oracle’s higher quarterly revenue
22 hours ago
