Dive Brief:
- AWS eliminated fees for moving data off of its public cloud services, the company announced in a Tuesday blog post by Principal Developer Advocate Sébastien Stormacq.
- The cloud provider said most customers are already eligible to transfer up to 100 gigabytes per month at no charge from several of its most common services, including Amazon EC2, Amazon Simple Storage Service and Application Load Balancer. Customers who exceed that limit can now apply to AWS Support for additional fee waivers, the announcement said.
- The move follows Google Cloud’s January decision to waive data egress fees and goes one step further, allowing customers to shift data without closing their account. AWS said it will “apply additional scrutiny” if a customer applies for waivers multiple times on the same account.
Dive Insight:
Cloud data egress charges are a pain point for customers, as companies spend nearly half of their cloud data storage budgets on various fees for data retrieval, transfer and analysis, according to a recent Wasabi report.
The issue became a magnet for regulatory oversight last year, too. The Federal Trade Commission opened an investigation into cloud business practices and their impact on market competition in March 2023 and cited egress fees as a concern in a November report.
Ofcom, the U.K. regulatory agency, came to a similar conclusion when it referred the public cloud infrastructure market to the Competition and Markets Authority for further investigation in October.
AWS acknowledged the waivers are a response both to customer concerns and regulatory action.
“We believe in customer choice, including the choice to move your data out of AWS,” Stormacq said in the post. “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.”
