AWS will increase the amount of data users can migrate to locations outside the public cloud environment at no cost. The plan applies to data from the various AWS regions and the AWS CloudFront Content Delivery Network (CDN).
By expanding the amount of data that users can freely migrate from its services, the tech giant addresses criticism of high data migration fees. Many end users of free AWS services complain that they can only transfer a limited amount of data for free to locations outside the public cloud. Any significant amount of data comes with costs.
AWS enables users to use hundreds of cloud services for free. For the public cloud provider, free use is a long-term means of upselling and customer retainment. However, the services are subject to restrictions.
The ‘egress’ of data, which describes data transfer from one public cloud to another, often involves hidden costs. The latter is one of the ways vendors lock in their users. AWS is no exception to the rule.
Competition from other providers
Another possible reason for AWS’ broadening of the data migration limit is competition from other cloud providers. Competitors are also increasingly offering free services or more attractive rates. Consider the recent announcement by CDN specialist Cloudflare that comes with an object storage environment that competes directly with Amazon S3.
Expanding AWS data migration quantities
Specifically, AWS is providing two expansions with its Free Tier Data Transfer Expansion. First, users of the free data migration services from the various AWS regions to the Internet or other locations can now transfer up to 100 GB per month for free. A massive expansion, as the previous limit was set at 1 GB per month. This includes data from Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3 object storage, Elastic Load Balancing and more. AWS GovCloud and AWS China regions are excluded from the expansion.
CloudFront expansion
As a second action, AWS is also making it possible to migrate more data from its Amazon CloudFront CDN environment. For this, users can now transfer 1 TB of data per month. Previously, the limit was set at 50 GB. Moreover, this limit is no longer limited to the first 12 months after sign-up.
Furthermore, the public cloud giant is increasing its CDN environment limit of HTTP and HTTPS requests from 2 million to 10 million. AWS also removes the 12-month limit of 2 million free CLoudFront help requests per month. This expansion does not apply to AWS CloudFront PoPs in China.
The new capabilities go into effect on December 1 of this year.
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