Free data transfer out to internet when moving out of AWS (opens in new tab)

Not sure where you're seeing honesty..

I don’t work at Amazon nor am I an accountant, but likely your intuition is correct. There’s this managerial accounting strategy called activity based costing (ABC) where you can better map costs (ie real money spent on stuff) to the company outputs; in this case data egress, but it works for all activities (server maintenance, programmer time, etc). You basically take a weighted average of the time and money spent on activities to understand the cost of those activities. This is how Amazon knows the costs of all its services.

The second question is a bit trickier to answer. Amazon has a lot of fixed costs and ABC is one way to allocate those fixed costs (fixed costs = servers). You can also do something similar for the revenues of different AWS services. However, managers will tend to look at revenues and costs together because teasing apart the different revenue streams and their allocated cost structures doesn’t match reality. If you go too deep into that rabbit hole, you lose sight of the true nature of the business. Which is “we buy a shitload of servers up front and rent them to you virtually by the second.” To answer the question, the egress revenue likely dwarfs all the other revenue generating activities at AWS, making the other services look “bad” when comparing revenue to costs. On paper, egress makes up substantially all profit for the business. But this is by design- executives believe that this business model captures the most value so they’re not that interested in jacking up other service costs because overall profitability will be less. Is there subsidization? Yes, but Amazon believes they have the better business by charging users like this vs pricing everything “fairly.”

in cali the power company says "you can use this cost structure or that cost structure, your choice!" - so it's this vile little game where if you choose incorrectly they scalp you, and it takes a bit of arithmetic to compute expected values, power usage at various times of day, etc - something the average joe may not be able to estimate easily. in an ideal world, they would automatically pick the lower of the two.

to a degree I have seen AWS plans work this way, where you choose from options A/B/C and buyer beware if you end up getting scalped.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress contains a pretty good overview of Amazon’s margins.

I 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.

The one to watch is https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/

AWS could plausibly claim _some_ additional expense on their premium network offering (not full rate, of course, but some) for the additional monitoring and adjustment they do to adjust to peering conditions but none of that is plausible for other companies peering with them who provide the same services. If their customer uses Fastly or Cloudflare, they don’t need any additional cost to toss packets over the wall and let the other service worry about routing. I’d imagine those companies are making sure that the EU regulators know exactly how much they need to charge for that.

Indeed. I think Amazon could argue that since egress rates are higher than ingress rates, effectively all their network costs are egress.

And all their network costs includes all the routers, all the fibers, all the staff in the networking and infrastructure teams, and all the teams that support those teams.

The 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.

> "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!

Then compare that statement with their FAQ,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.

Its 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

The 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.

Well the biggest "scalers" have become Cloud providers themselves.

I think there's a good saying about Cloud and scaling, paraphrasing - "if you don't start on Cloud that's unwise and if you (over)stay that's insane". I guess as your solution reaches maturity and stability (no sudden swings in usage or complete changes in the architecture) then you should start thinking about some on-prem solution with maybe the hardware being leased along with maitenance.

The 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.

You have an answer of why they think it applies in this case, but since it read to me like you were asking what the phrase itself meant (or in case it helps anyone else): it's most often used as 'arguing in bad faith' meaning wilfully misunderstanding the other party or just generally an insincere argument as a proxy or pretext for something else or with some ulterior motive.

So briefly in this case AWS does something which seems superficially good, but the real reason is to appease a law that it actually doesn't properly comply with. (Is the, not my, claim.) i.e. a good thing done in bad faith.

Exactly 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?

The market price for IPv4 addresses has peaked:

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.

You 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.

Invisible 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

Amazon, Google and Azure are anything but free market; they have been getting subsidies and abatements in the 10s of billions all along.

Invisible hand works in the free market, unfortunately the free market only exists in theory.

The 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.

Financial markets are some of the most regulated environments anywhere.

GCP, Azure and AWS have been here for more than 10 years, free to do almost whatever they want. Did the prices decrease and competions pop up everywhere ?

How can the ability to transfer data to another cloud provider or your own server increase price?? Doesn't that mean there is more & fairer competition?

Do you think that alternate clouds will offer better or worse pricing and incentives to migrate as a result of this?

I 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.