Data Egress Cloud Costs For Azure and AWS

Data Egress Cloud Costs for Azure and AWS – Understanding Bandwidth, Egress and Data Transfer 

When businesses move to a major public cloud provider, there is often a question raised around how much data will be transferred between platforms and the data egress cloud costs associated. It’s an important factor, as moving data out of the cloud platform or even between different data centres or regions can have applicable charges (called Egress Charges or Egress Fees) related to this data.  

One of the biggest problems is that it can often be difficult to determine how much and which data types will fit into this bracket of Data Egress charges and what is considered to be Ingress or inbound data. Data Egress implies the movement of data across a particular network boundary or platform whilst Ingress is data traffic that enters the boundary of the same network.

Data Transfers – Moving Data to the Cloud

Both major cloud providers encourage businesses to migrate data to their platform and for this reason, they both offer free inbound data transfer to all services in all regions. This can in fact help to overcome any initial financial hurdles when migrating to a cloud service, particularly if the business has accumulated a large amount of data and require a large storage requirement when migrating.

The charges for data transfer begin to take effect as data traverses across the cloud providers global network, as it consumes their infrastructure such as dark fibre and connectivity between regions, continents and/or availability zones.

For the purposes of this blog, we are going to set some perquisites whereby the cloud platform in question is based within Europe and that the pricing evaluation will be based on transfers between other regions or to the public internet. Similar pricing structures apply for other regions but will vary in costs per Gb transferred.

Data Egress Cloud Charges – Internet Egress, Data Transfer Out

The easier of the data egress cloud costs models to understand is Internet egress charges, whereby per Gb charges apply in data being transferred out from the public cloud provider storage to the public internet. For our worked example below, we are going to apply a pricing table based on using the cloud providers backbone network rather than routed through a transit ISP.

Both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services provide egress packages for data with applicable per Gb rates, such that the more volume consumed the price point reduces. Both follow the same structure of First 10Tb/ per month, Next 40TB/Month, Next 100Tb/Month. Once passed the 100TB mark the providers differ whereas AWS then has greater than 150Tb/Month pricing whilst Azure has another layer of Next 350TB per month.

Azure provide businesses with the first 5Gb/month of data free from any region, whilst AWS offer a free 15GBs of data transfer from their AWS Free Usage Tier available across all regions for 1 year after which you get 1Gb data egress free per month per region. The pricing table below is not based on using any of these benefits and is priced in GBP and are guide prices.

Data Egress – Azure & AWS Data Transfer Costs

*Note that 1TB is equivalent to 1,000Gb 

Please also bear in mind that the Azure and AWS data transfer cost examples listed above are simply being used to show scalability on a per TB package. Smaller businesses may not have excessive egress charges whilst enterprises with the requirement to transfer data out frequently would need to evaluate the best method to move data in and out of cloud provider storage packages.

Data Egress Cloud Transfer between Regions and Availability Zones

Moving data out of an organisations cloud storage will attract the standard data egress charges as discussed above, but the direction of travel for business is more global and resilience needs to be considered. The public cloud providers have been the natural go-to for this type of deployment as they have footprints in all the major places organisations want to do business. Today businesses tend to have data and compute operations in multiple regions or have elected to deploy geo-redundant footprints within AWS and Azure. The result is that data from each of these regions need to be transferred to cater for backups, snapshots and disaster recovery.

Businesses considering this type of topology, therefore, need to take into consideration the charges for both data egress out of the public provider’s network and also any data that traverses from one data centre location to another between defined Geo’s or regions.

Microsoft Azure and AWS both take the stance that data transfer within the same availability zone is free (for example UK West), although from July 2022 Microsoft Azure is making one change that will apply charges. These charges will apply to data transfers either ingress or egress, where a VNet resource is deployed in an Availability Zone and is linked to another resource in a different Availability Zone. For the uninitiated, a VNet is a virtual method of linking network resources together either locally or globally and this new charge will see charges for data moving in networks spanning more than one Availability Zone.

As a European example, an Inter-Region data transfer (meaning within a particular continent) is where data is transferred between two Azure Availability Zone or two AWS Regions. The following charges would apply;

• Microsoft Azure have a blanket charge of $0.02 per Gb
• Amazon Web Services have a blanket charge of $0.02 per Gb

For data that needs to be transferred between continents via an inter-continental data transfer then the charges are as follows;

• Microsoft Azure, from Europe to other continents is charged at $0.05 per Gb
• Amazon Web Services, from Europe to other continents is charged at $0.02 per Gb

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