Big tech firms – moving to another cloud provider will cost you $50M in egress fees.
EU – actually, it must be free.
Big tech firms – free and open competition is integral to society, and we value freedom of choice over anything else, so of course data transfer is free for our valued customers.
I hope this is just the start of egress fee changes in response to the European Data Act. Taking a look at other parts of the law's text [1], I think this change related to Article 25, but Article 34 section 2 is what really stands out to me:
> Where a data processing service is being used in parallel with another data processing service, the providers of data processing services may impose data egress charges, but only for the purpose of passing on egress costs incurred, without exceeding such costs.
Hopefully this article doesn't end up with exploitable loopholes. Bringing down AWS, GCP, and Azure egress costs to market rates could majorly help reduce cloud lock-in gradually without having to close your entire account.
My question (and maybe it is answered there but I don't want to read a full legal document to find it).
What exactly do they consider "costs"? Is it just the cost they pay an IP for data out or can it include maintenance, hardware, people, etc?
I am also curious if this will have any impact on the cost of services. Does AWS do any sort of thing where the higher egress costs offset the cost of services? Or ingress costs, or internal communication costs? Stuff that does cost AWS something to run in some form but could have been paid for by this.
It's a question I honestly don't know, so I am curious.
So do we know how much are the egress costs for AWS?
In other words how much AWS is overcharging?
I guess they make every effort / creative bookkeeping trick to exaggerate their egress costs and it will take years until EU completes their investigation and fines them and more years until courts have had their final word.
It gets to the meat and potatoes at the end. They were forced to do it, so they put a positive spin on it as if they're doing it out of the goodness of their heart.
Still a positive, but man, that marketing messaging. I give props to the team who wrote that.
It shows they know they are raking people over the coals with intentional, preconceived illegal anticompetitive behavior written into their documentation.
Right from the playbook, they have a sweet marketing wrapup for when they have to walk back their preconceived illegal behavior to the minimum directed border.
Tech corps especially now do this as standard operating procedure (I mean Uber had entire divisions and armies of lawyers to bypass/obfuscate/delay imposition of local cab and labor laws). It's why you can't trust them with AI, personal information, AI, customer service, AI, following laws, AI, or anything.
I know Google in the heydey of the aughts wasn't as "good" as they tried to be, but at least the "do no evil" kind of kept them in check to some degree. But at some point they bought the corporation-formerly-known-as-DoubleClick, and I think in retrospect that was the beginning of the end of functional idealism in the internet.
Speaking for and only for Amazon Redshift, as I have little knowledge of other AWS services, I hold AWS's blogs, messaging, Support communications, TAMs, the lot, as relentlessly positive and to my eye deliberately and knowingly obfuscating all weakness. I regard information from AWS regarding Redshift as safe to read when and only when you already know what's going on / the underlying truth. Otherwise you will be misled, and to your cost at AWS's benefit.
By the sounds of it, the messaging over this change in data policy is the same.
> Probably obeying the letter of the European Data Act, but obviously not great if true.
Does it really matter? As long as they are upfront about the price and there is no vendor lock in, what's the big deal? AWS is overpriced - everyone knows that, but i don't think its morally wrong to be overpriced as long as you aren't deceptive about it.
> We don’t require you to close your account or change your relationship with AWS in any way. You’re welcome to come back at any time. We will, of course, apply additional scrutiny if the same AWS account applies multiple times for free DTO.
> Over 90 percent of our customers already incur no data transfer expenses out of AWS because we provide 100 gigabytes per month free from AWS Regions to the internet.
Damn, that's a lot of tiny customers. 100 GB per month is less than what many use on their phone during a month. So basically, most people using AWS is definitely people who don't need it to scale.
I wonder what customer sizes really matter to them. Are the bulk of their revenue a lot of small/medium-sized companies paying a few 10-100k a year, or do they have a few government/bigcorp whales subsidizing the service for the rest?
> So basically, most people using AWS is definitely people who don't need it to scale.
This is what we would expect, right? Surely the huge majority of AWS users are small and wouldn't have the slightest interest in owning/managing their own hardware.
AFAIK this is pretty much the moat collapsing on big cloud. That said you still have to contact them for it so not truly free movement. Once it becomes truly free to move data out things will get interesting. The stock market didn’t really seem to care that much which was surprising.
I think AWS doesn't truly care. They've probably internally planned for the day when egress cost billing would be chipped away and have been planning. It is a total cash cow and huge boast on margins for them, but they've been taking that money over the years and diversifying into managed services.
The managed services are expensive, but boy do they work well. Over the last couple years been running +100 each of managed elastic searches, RDS, and firehouse with minimal to no issues.
Google ostensibly offers this as well. However - I’m in the middle of moving us to Azure and I have more details on the Google deal: you only have 60 days to complete the migration and then you must terminate your billing account. It’s a total window dressing of an offer and completely unrealistic for any reasonably large organization to use. Malicious compliance at its finest and I hope they get sued by the EU for it until they make it a more reasonable offer.
I have still lived in the obviously false belief that AWS charges for every egress byte (regular operation not take out, except Lightsail, which always had rather large quota included.) Now they claim every account has big free tier. When has that changed?
Replying to myself: Of course these price reductions why they suddenly charge for IPv4 addresses. To my understanding AWS does not suffer from scarcity, they have huge pools.
At least for customers using a lot of egress the charging per address is probably cheaper. For small businesses with relatively little businesses but not so slim deployments with addresses hanging around on many little used or even forgotten resources it's the other way round.
Edit: I had already forgotten the 42% price raise hitting myself on my personal Lightsail instance in May.
Good for them, but sounds like there was a gun to their head. I didn’t realize any law like that had passed. I guess it’s nice of them to extend it to the whole world ;)
If AWS cut most of the egress fees, not only by asking to their support, that would be the greatest thing ever happening in the cloud computing space.
A lot of multi-cloud architectures are unlikely to be designed because the egress fees are killing them. Imagine if we could host some of the infra in AWS, using S3, but keeping some machines on Hetzner, while calling other APIs hosted in azure… one day it will happen :’)
Can you reference where it says that regular, day-to-day egress between clouds is going to be covered by this recent change? All the articles I've found so far imply that this free egress will be granted on a case-by-case basis, for egress that is not considered operational data, but rather explicitly for migrating out of AWS for the purpose of terminating your relationship with AWS.
You dont need to wait for that one day. Right now I’m using cloud servers from hetzner and store data in Backblaze S3 and train models on Lambda or even vast.ai.
In reference to the EU legislating, Amazon will just seek/get revenue gains elsewhere. It won’t be immediate, it won’t be obvious, but it will happen.
Take EU261, which caused issues for smaller airlines, leading to less competition, increased fares. There are also claims it’s affecting safety [0]. I’m not against EU261 per se, but it’s healthy to be critical of large institutions like the EU.
People, I find, cheer about new EU legislation but then forget to look think about any consequences a few years down the road.
Where is the EU’s own critical evaluation and performance review of EU261, especially given it’s been heavily revised through case law over the years?
(FWIW, I live in Europe, I’m generally pro EU, but it’s not all roses)
Right it shifts prices around, but reduced the lock-in. No regulator cares that Mercedes are more expensive than Kia. Regulators will be interested if Mercedes charges 30k to reset the car for resale or some other silly analogy
Before EU261, the passanger took on the risk for delays and cancelations mainly due to the operational performance of the airline. After, the airlines now directly take on some of that risk. I'm of the opinion, that if airlines did this well in general, or the industry had a reasonable solution in place, such regulation would not have been made in the first place.
So, if it caused issues for smaller airlines and generally increase in prices, is that not a clear indication that the smaller airlines do not have sufficiently capability to handle it, and that prices was too low?
As far as AWS 'koolaid' goes, you picked the stuff that's actually pretty useful and sensible to use. (But also fairly portable anyway? The big ones at least have pretty comparable solutions.)
These aren’t the rates Amazon charges for user hitting their servers right? How do they even get away with charging more for data transfers of a certain type?
> 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.
paxys|2 years ago
EU – actually, it must be free.
Big tech firms – free and open competition is integral to society, and we value freedom of choice over anything else, so of course data transfer is free for our valued customers.
SturgeonsLaw|2 years ago
bnprks|2 years ago
> Where a data processing service is being used in parallel with another data processing service, the providers of data processing services may impose data egress charges, but only for the purpose of passing on egress costs incurred, without exceeding such costs.
Hopefully this article doesn't end up with exploitable loopholes. Bringing down AWS, GCP, and Azure egress costs to market rates could majorly help reduce cloud lock-in gradually without having to close your entire account.
[1]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:...
nerdjon|2 years ago
What exactly do they consider "costs"? Is it just the cost they pay an IP for data out or can it include maintenance, hardware, people, etc?
I am also curious if this will have any impact on the cost of services. Does AWS do any sort of thing where the higher egress costs offset the cost of services? Or ingress costs, or internal communication costs? Stuff that does cost AWS something to run in some form but could have been paid for by this.
It's a question I honestly don't know, so I am curious.
usr1106|2 years ago
In other words how much AWS is overcharging?
I guess they make every effort / creative bookkeeping trick to exaggerate their egress costs and it will take years until EU completes their investigation and fines them and more years until courts have had their final word.
Justsignedup|2 years ago
Still a positive, but man, that marketing messaging. I give props to the team who wrote that.
Havoc|2 years ago
Googles equivalent announcement was all flowery bullshit making it seem like a voluntary action
AtlasBarfed|2 years ago
It shows they know they are raking people over the coals with intentional, preconceived illegal anticompetitive behavior written into their documentation.
Right from the playbook, they have a sweet marketing wrapup for when they have to walk back their preconceived illegal behavior to the minimum directed border.
Tech corps especially now do this as standard operating procedure (I mean Uber had entire divisions and armies of lawyers to bypass/obfuscate/delay imposition of local cab and labor laws). It's why you can't trust them with AI, personal information, AI, customer service, AI, following laws, AI, or anything.
I know Google in the heydey of the aughts wasn't as "good" as they tried to be, but at least the "do no evil" kind of kept them in check to some degree. But at some point they bought the corporation-formerly-known-as-DoubleClick, and I think in retrospect that was the beginning of the end of functional idealism in the internet.
Max-Ganz-II|2 years ago
Speaking for and only for Amazon Redshift, as I have little knowledge of other AWS services, I hold AWS's blogs, messaging, Support communications, TAMs, the lot, as relentlessly positive and to my eye deliberately and knowingly obfuscating all weakness. I regard information from AWS regarding Redshift as safe to read when and only when you already know what's going on / the underlying truth. Otherwise you will be misled, and to your cost at AWS's benefit.
By the sounds of it, the messaging over this change in data policy is the same.
artwr|2 years ago
Probably obeying the letter of the European Data Act, but obviously not great if true.
bawolff|2 years ago
Does it really matter? As long as they are upfront about the price and there is no vendor lock in, what's the big deal? AWS is overpriced - everyone knows that, but i don't think its morally wrong to be overpriced as long as you aren't deceptive about it.
scarface_74|2 years ago
LelouBil|2 years ago
> We don’t require you to close your account or change your relationship with AWS in any way. You’re welcome to come back at any time. We will, of course, apply additional scrutiny if the same AWS account applies multiple times for free DTO.
NorwegianDude|2 years ago
Damn, that's a lot of tiny customers. 100 GB per month is less than what many use on their phone during a month. So basically, most people using AWS is definitely people who don't need it to scale.
Hamuko|2 years ago
h1fra|2 years ago
ralphist|2 years ago
pgwhalen|2 years ago
This is what we would expect, right? Surely the huge majority of AWS users are small and wouldn't have the slightest interest in owning/managing their own hardware.
supriyo-biswas|2 years ago
The law mandates egress costs should either be free or not exceed the costs encountered by the cloud provider.
foofie|2 years ago
blinding-streak|2 years ago
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/11/google-vows-not-to-charge-da...
gerogerke|2 years ago
uptownfunk|2 years ago
ckdarby|2 years ago
The managed services are expensive, but boy do they work well. Over the last couple years been running +100 each of managed elastic searches, RDS, and firehouse with minimal to no issues.
astanway|2 years ago
usr1106|2 years ago
Edit: My search engine found December 2021:
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/11/aws-price...
usr1106|2 years ago
At least for customers using a lot of egress the charging per address is probably cheaper. For small businesses with relatively little businesses but not so slim deployments with addresses hanging around on many little used or even forgotten resources it's the other way round.
Edit: I had already forgotten the 42% price raise hitting myself on my personal Lightsail instance in May.
eastdakota|2 years ago
beoberha|2 years ago
RoyTyrell|2 years ago
Lucasoato|2 years ago
A lot of multi-cloud architectures are unlikely to be designed because the egress fees are killing them. Imagine if we could host some of the infra in AWS, using S3, but keeping some machines on Hetzner, while calling other APIs hosted in azure… one day it will happen :’)
Falimonda|2 years ago
renonce|2 years ago
switch007|2 years ago
Take EU261, which caused issues for smaller airlines, leading to less competition, increased fares. There are also claims it’s affecting safety [0]. I’m not against EU261 per se, but it’s healthy to be critical of large institutions like the EU.
People, I find, cheer about new EU legislation but then forget to look think about any consequences a few years down the road.
Where is the EU’s own critical evaluation and performance review of EU261, especially given it’s been heavily revised through case law over the years?
(FWIW, I live in Europe, I’m generally pro EU, but it’s not all roses)
[0] (obviously some bias given it’s the ERAA) https://www.eraa.org/sites/default/files/era_eu261_study_bro...
zaphirplane|2 years ago
mythhabit|2 years ago
So, if it caused issues for smaller airlines and generally increase in prices, is that not a clear indication that the smaller airlines do not have sufficiently capability to handle it, and that prices was too low?
gtirloni|2 years ago
Otherwise, if they really cared about their customers, they'd just lower outgoing data transfer pricing at all times and not only when you're leaving.
zx8080|2 years ago
andrewstuart|2 years ago
Unless of course you went all in on IAM, Lambda, API gateway etc etc instead of just running software on Linux.
In which case you’ll need to stay.
OJFord|2 years ago
pinkgolem|2 years ago
hinkley|2 years ago
Tabular-Iceberg|2 years ago
No, you don’t.
DogLover_|2 years ago
drpossum|2 years ago
weikju|2 years ago
Thank you, EU, on behalf of the rest of the world
lelanthran|2 years ago
Reality: the invisible hand is simply a fist made up of all members of a cartel.
switch007|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
ukuina|2 years ago
sgjohnson|2 years ago