Looks like it's a response to the recent cloud services market investigation by the CMA [1].
Which highlighted "Egress fees harm competition by creating barriers to switching and multi-cloud leading to cloud service providers entrenching their position" [2].
It's also interesting that they are calling out problems with software licensing, as that is another thing the CMA is investigating in their cloud market review.
I read through a couple of these responses to the CMA by MS, Google and AWS and their smaller competitors
as expected the hyperscalers refuse to acknowledge that the free ingress and expensive egress is a lock-in mechanism, and their smaller competitors complain bitterly about this
the hyperscalers say they have to charge egress fees to pay for the costs in building their networks, but for some reason doesn't apply to ingress (which they're silent on)
if they want to play this game then the CMA should simply make them charge the same for ingress and egress
that way they can "fund their network costs" without issue, and if they want to make them both free then that's their decision
I don't see it that way at all. Those egregious egress charges still apply while you are actively using GCP, encouraging you to put everything in GCP, and eschew multicloud.
This seems to me more of a "try us out for free" play. Bring your big data here, if you end up not liking it, we won't penalize you for taking your data out. Given that GCP is running at a very distant 3rd, they need to make plays like this.
So on the one hand Google now accepts that egress fees are outrageous. Great! On the other hand, they're only reducing (removing) the fees when you leave them.
If this move were really about acting in customers' best interests, they would reduce the fees for everyone. Doing this only for departing customers feels performative.
Google is part of Cloudflare's Bandwidth Alliance [1] which is removing most egress fees. Google still charges for egress, but it's half of what AWS is charging. We moved everything off of S3 anyway and have been using Cloudflare's R2 storage along with Google Compute Engine instances. R2 can be a little flaky, but the cost savings for us more than makes up for it.
Unless they’re planning to kill GCP entirely. Then everyone is a departing customer /s
But seriously, it seems like a fair-ish compromise. The 60 day limit is tough though. As long as you’re continuing your usage and not using offsite backups, ingress/egress isn’t probably too problematic. It’s only problematic when you try to suddenly egress all data you’ve ever stored, which you probably wouldn’t do unless you’re migrating away.
The cynical might wonder if this is a precursor to Google closing down its cloud.
They can't really shut Google Cloud down and still be charging people to exit.
And if they had suddenly seen the light on egress fees then surely they would have cut egress fees everywhere..... the fact that it's only on account closure is kinda suspicious.
Shutting down a $30B+ business would be such a ridiculous, yet Google-esque decision. It would also be a huge shame for consumers - the public cloud is already an Oligopoly
All over the Internet people are slapping google on the back for..... pretty much nothing. In fact much of the praise seems to be worded as though Google had dropped all egress fees.
Google continues to charge the nothing-short-of-highway-robbery 12 cents per gigabyte unless you are in Australia in which case its 19 cents per gigabyte. This is astoundingly bad value.
What are people hailing Google's "free to exit" in such glowing terms. Even herein the comments people are cheering for Google.
Worth noting at this point that Cloudflare R2 charges 0 cents per gigabyte egress.
> Certain legacy providers leverage their on-premises software monopolies to create cloud monopolies, using restrictive licensing practices that lock in customers and warp competition.
I like to see them publicly call out Microsoft and Oracle.
I think the "Legacy" and "licensing" portions are specifically calling out MS and Oracle, but they very sneakily are calling AWS out too on the fact that egress makes it insanely expensive to leave their platform.
I've worked at some orgs where to either move their data out of S3 would cost $20k, or to even delete it would cost thousands in API calls.
I don't. This is very much the pot calling the kettle black. Of the cloud providers, Google has the least pleasant business tactics. I would do business with AWS gladly, with Azure, but never with Google.
Google should have made the same announcement without the snarky mean-spirited bitterness.
Egress fees are way too high.
And it doesn't keep anyone in cloud, if you want to move out, you do it.
In fact, I think the fear of egress costs keeps more people OUT of cloud than it keeps people in.
This is a smart move that won't cost them anything and may increase their business.
I know plenty of companies who can't afford the Aws egress fees to get their data out of Aws, and it's far cheaper to just pay storage for one more month and kick the can down the road.
I clicked the link and you have to _apply_ and potentially be admitted just to get a free exit? So there's no guarantee??
Is requiring a Google committee review/application process a new trend with Google products? I recently was denied on another application through Google for API access to get one businesses GMB reviews, and it's frustrating because there's no recourse. Google is so opaque now.
Getting ahead of antitrust I see. Big tech has gotten so big that we will now see this peace meal stuff being done to appease regulators to stave off any major action.
Google Cloud has ~10% market share; I don't think this is an antitrust avoidance play. More likely, it's removing a concern companies might have with bringing workloads onto a relatively smaller player. Especially one that has a history of discontinuing products.
don't think so. Google is the distant 3rd in the Cloud, so hardly a subject to antitrust. It is more likely that failing hard on their goals for the Cloud set to that division about 3 years ago (and it was rumored that either they achieve the goals or it is "or else" for the Cloud division) they are starting the blame game whining about licensing/unfair competition/etc. (whereis they should blame only themselves as they would never bend over to the enterprise customer like say AWS would do who for example developed MS SQL (Transact SQL) interface to their own db - that is how you deal with the competition and software lock-in instead of whining (reminds that phrase from Babel - "that is why Benja is the king, while we are sitting on the cemetery fence"). In this case for example I remember how AWS was hunting down laid off Sybase (where T-SQL comes from) engineers whereis being an experienced enterprise software developer is viewed by Google is more like a disadvantage and results in meager offer (several my acquaintances had similar experience), so GCP losing enterprise game doesn't look that surprising to me. And now that enterprise customers are starting to add huge AI related workloads the GCP is hardly ever mentioned)
3. You will automatically be refunded all network egress fees incurred in the final 60 days, capped at the number of gigabytes you had stored in our products in the preceding 60 days.
The process requires people to be aware of the offer and contact support. A few months down the road, nobody will remember this exists, so most migrations won't actually make use of it.
That's a cool thing for them to do, an interesting business choice, but cool. It certainly helps the companies feel a little better about vendor lock-in, which is terribly plentiful in the cloud.
The TLDR is that when you tell them you want to cancel, you have 60 days to do so and during that time you'll have no egress fees. Makes sense.
Biggest problem though is... if you have a substantial amount of data or need to do a complex and seamless transition - this probably won't work for you. I would have to be on the DevOps team that's told to move a complicated and data-heavy application, and they only had 60 days to do so. Also the bulk of the data movement is, in my experience, one of the first steps of migration - not the last.
My hope is that, if nothing else, this will spur similar behaviors in other large cloud providers ::cough::aws::cough::.
Sounds like they're trying to technically address EU regulators' concerns without providing any real value to customers.
In real life it's probably extremely unusual for any company to altogether cancel their Google Cloud contract. More likely is the scenario where you move the bulk of your cloud usage to a new provider, but still have various straggler infrastructure on the old one, which is not worth the effort to clean up. Or, you go to a multi-cloud strategy so you want to move half your data off Google but keep the other half around. Google's egress fees are still standing in the way of these cases.
> I would have to be on the DevOps team that's told to move a complicated and data-heavy application, and they only had 60 days to do so. Also the bulk of the data movement is, in my experience, one of the first steps of migration - not the last.
Couldn't you wait to tell Google until you've more or less figured out the logistics, then tell Google that you're leaving, fees for egress gets disabled and you initiate the move. Then you have 60 days to complete the move.
But yeah, if the move takes 30 days because you have a ton of data, and you figure out after the move is complete, that you missed 10%, you only have 30 days to figure out how to get that out too.
Egress bandwidth costs have been discounted for years. Including GCP. Bandwidth Alliance... Like 10 years ago traffic cost was a real problem with the cloud. Today there are other areas that are expensive.
> Certain legacy providers leverage their on-premises software monopolies to create cloud monopolies, using restrictive licensing practices that lock in customers and warp competition.
This is fine issue of its own. But the way it is laced up here muddies the waters around this actual news.
Google was doing the wrong thing and is changing that while not really taking responsibility for doing the wrong thing.
But to make that less obvious, this other concern is brought into the story creating this high ground on a separate topic.
The strategic reframing of corporate communications is tiring.
The audacity of ranting about some cloud provider leveraging their licensing and then dropping a link to Azure in the next sentence, I love it, thanks Google.
I love that Google are willing to such a big swing at Microsoft in the text of this announcement - I just wish AWS wasn't so badly shackled busy it's marketing and PR people these days.
Hi. I fix AWS bills for a living and also shitpost a lot.
This is a smart play that costs them basically nothing. Remember that egressing data costs customers at worst 3x the monthly cost of storing it. Nobody is avoiding leaving because of the egress fee.
What this does do is assuage the “lock-in” fear common in cloud-reluctant customers, while presents them as being forward thinking.
I’ve never heard of a cloud migration where the data egress wasn’t at least an order of magnitude less than the engineering cost of the migration itself.
The parent poster https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig is one of my favorite Twitter accounts. Every day he gives me renewed hope that, no matter how much I wish I had more time to devote to developer experience for people using the internal tools and APIs I design on the startup side of things... at least it'll be better than the DX and customer service provided by the biggest players providing infrastructure to our entire industry :)
I share the view that nobody avoids an exit or migration because of egress fees. In fact, for online migrations the period of replicating data between providers might go on for months.
But all cloud providers leverage The Principle of data locality or data gravity, which states that compute benefits from being close to the stored data. If a customer moves the data elsewhere it follows that the compute will soon leave too.
At face value this is a good thing, but I gotta say it’s pretty rich for Google to try to diss other cloud vendors for leveraging their effective monopolies given its moves in search and now browsers. Sorry, but GCP doesn’t get a pass on Google’s other behavior just because currently a loser in the cloud infra market.
jdon|2 years ago
Which highlighted "Egress fees harm competition by creating barriers to switching and multi-cloud leading to cloud service providers entrenching their position" [2].
It's also interesting that they are calling out problems with software licensing, as that is another thing the CMA is investigating in their cloud market review.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/cloud-services-market-investiga...
[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/652e958b69726...
blibble|2 years ago
as expected the hyperscalers refuse to acknowledge that the free ingress and expensive egress is a lock-in mechanism, and their smaller competitors complain bitterly about this
the hyperscalers say they have to charge egress fees to pay for the costs in building their networks, but for some reason doesn't apply to ingress (which they're silent on)
if they want to play this game then the CMA should simply make them charge the same for ingress and egress
that way they can "fund their network costs" without issue, and if they want to make them both free then that's their decision
jiveturkey|2 years ago
This seems to me more of a "try us out for free" play. Bring your big data here, if you end up not liking it, we won't penalize you for taking your data out. Given that GCP is running at a very distant 3rd, they need to make plays like this.
profsummergig|2 years ago
If they remove the fees, then competition might be pressured to do so (as a marketing response). Thus making it easier for people to switch to Google.
gnfargbl|2 years ago
If this move were really about acting in customers' best interests, they would reduce the fees for everyone. Doing this only for departing customers feels performative.
Patrick_Devine|2 years ago
[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/
vineyardmike|2 years ago
But seriously, it seems like a fair-ish compromise. The 60 day limit is tough though. As long as you’re continuing your usage and not using offsite backups, ingress/egress isn’t probably too problematic. It’s only problematic when you try to suddenly egress all data you’ve ever stored, which you probably wouldn’t do unless you’re migrating away.
andrewstuart|2 years ago
They can't really shut Google Cloud down and still be charging people to exit.
And if they had suddenly seen the light on egress fees then surely they would have cut egress fees everywhere..... the fact that it's only on account closure is kinda suspicious.
mgfist|2 years ago
joeldo|2 years ago
Sebb767|2 years ago
I'm not quite sure about this. Obviously they don't do it now, but I wouldn't have put it beyond them.
xeonmc|2 years ago
andrewstuart|2 years ago
All over the Internet people are slapping google on the back for..... pretty much nothing. In fact much of the praise seems to be worded as though Google had dropped all egress fees.
Google continues to charge the nothing-short-of-highway-robbery 12 cents per gigabyte unless you are in Australia in which case its 19 cents per gigabyte. This is astoundingly bad value.
What are people hailing Google's "free to exit" in such glowing terms. Even herein the comments people are cheering for Google.
Worth noting at this point that Cloudflare R2 charges 0 cents per gigabyte egress.
justinclift|2 years ago
loosescrews|2 years ago
I like to see them publicly call out Microsoft and Oracle.
SteveNuts|2 years ago
I've worked at some orgs where to either move their data out of S3 would cost $20k, or to even delete it would cost thousands in API calls.
blagie|2 years ago
Google should have made the same announcement without the snarky mean-spirited bitterness.
xnx|2 years ago
pwarner|2 years ago
londons_explore|2 years ago
otterley|2 years ago
https://cloud.google.com/exit-cloud
* Free data transfers related to Google Cloud Exit are available on Premium Tier Network Service Tier
* Only data residing in Google Cloud data storage and data management products are covered
* You must report any changes to your migration timeline set out in your request form to the Google Cloud Support team
* You must submit your free data transfer request prior to the termination of your Google Cloud agreement
* Google Cloud reserves the right to audit movement of customers' data away from Google Cloud for compliance with program terms and conditions
cobertos|2 years ago
Is requiring a Google committee review/application process a new trend with Google products? I recently was denied on another application through Google for API access to get one businesses GMB reviews, and it's frustrating because there's no recourse. Google is so opaque now.
robertlagrant|2 years ago
seatac76|2 years ago
kaonwarb|2 years ago
trhway|2 years ago
pimlottc|2 years ago
*piecemeal
ado__dev|2 years ago
I still feel that the egress fees charged by the big 3 are way too high.
londons_explore|2 years ago
Why not:
1. Migrate your data out.
2. Close your account.
3. You will automatically be refunded all network egress fees incurred in the final 60 days, capped at the number of gigabytes you had stored in our products in the preceding 60 days.
Kwpolska|2 years ago
arccy|2 years ago
danpalmer|2 years ago
andersa|2 years ago
robertlagrant|2 years ago
ShakataGaNai|2 years ago
The TLDR is that when you tell them you want to cancel, you have 60 days to do so and during that time you'll have no egress fees. Makes sense.
Biggest problem though is... if you have a substantial amount of data or need to do a complex and seamless transition - this probably won't work for you. I would have to be on the DevOps team that's told to move a complicated and data-heavy application, and they only had 60 days to do so. Also the bulk of the data movement is, in my experience, one of the first steps of migration - not the last.
My hope is that, if nothing else, this will spur similar behaviors in other large cloud providers ::cough::aws::cough::.
kentonv|2 years ago
In real life it's probably extremely unusual for any company to altogether cancel their Google Cloud contract. More likely is the scenario where you move the bulk of your cloud usage to a new provider, but still have various straggler infrastructure on the old one, which is not worth the effort to clean up. Or, you go to a multi-cloud strategy so you want to move half your data off Google but keep the other half around. Google's egress fees are still standing in the way of these cases.
diggan|2 years ago
Couldn't you wait to tell Google until you've more or less figured out the logistics, then tell Google that you're leaving, fees for egress gets disabled and you initiate the move. Then you have 60 days to complete the move.
But yeah, if the move takes 30 days because you have a ton of data, and you figure out after the move is complete, that you missed 10%, you only have 30 days to figure out how to get that out too.
AtNightWeCode|2 years ago
bredren|2 years ago
This is fine issue of its own. But the way it is laced up here muddies the waters around this actual news.
Google was doing the wrong thing and is changing that while not really taking responsibility for doing the wrong thing.
But to make that less obvious, this other concern is brought into the story creating this high ground on a separate topic.
The strategic reframing of corporate communications is tiring.
dilyevsky|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
hiroshi3110|2 years ago
asmor|2 years ago
hipadev23|2 years ago
anyoneamous|2 years ago
plantain|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
6nf|2 years ago
calling it now
flanked-evergl|2 years ago
asylteltine|2 years ago
willsmith72|2 years ago
QuinnyPig|2 years ago
This is a smart play that costs them basically nothing. Remember that egressing data costs customers at worst 3x the monthly cost of storing it. Nobody is avoiding leaving because of the egress fee.
What this does do is assuage the “lock-in” fear common in cloud-reluctant customers, while presents them as being forward thinking.
I’ve never heard of a cloud migration where the data egress wasn’t at least an order of magnitude less than the engineering cost of the migration itself.
btown|2 years ago
The parent poster https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig is one of my favorite Twitter accounts. Every day he gives me renewed hope that, no matter how much I wish I had more time to devote to developer experience for people using the internal tools and APIs I design on the startup side of things... at least it'll be better than the DX and customer service provided by the biggest players providing infrastructure to our entire industry :)
danielvaughn|2 years ago
xer|2 years ago
But all cloud providers leverage The Principle of data locality or data gravity, which states that compute benefits from being close to the stored data. If a customer moves the data elsewhere it follows that the compute will soon leave too.
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
frankfrank13|2 years ago
[deleted]
Mortiffer|2 years ago
CobrastanJorji|2 years ago
skywhopper|2 years ago