After Google in January, it’s now AWS’s turn to announce the end of egress fees, the cost of repatriating data from the cloud. Admittedly, this is an improvement. But not exactly a “gift”.

The end of egress fees? Yes… but so what? AWS’s decision follows a similar announcement by Google Cloud, which announced in January that it would no longer charge exit fees for customers wishing to leave its platform.

As with Google Cloud Platform, AWS requires customers to seek approval before continuing with their projects. The main difference between their policies is that Google Cloud Platform seems to insist that customers close their accounts completely in order to qualify for exit credits, whereas AWS does not.

On one condition

For many analysts, Google Cloud Platform was just an announcement. The third hyperscaler has differentiated itself. But not for long. AWS followed suit. And everything points to Microsoft, IBM and the other players following suit.

“We believe in customer choice, including the choice to move your data out of AWS,” said Sébastien Stormacq, Principal Developer Advocate, AWS, in a blog post on 5 March. In 2021, AWS had already announced the possibility of transferring 100 GB of data per month per cloud region for free (instead of 1 GB previously) for services such as EC2, S3, Elastic Load Balancing and others, but without specifying the full list. Similarly, the Amazon subsidiary had made it free to repatriate 1 TB of data per month from AWS CloudFront. These limits have now been lifted, on one condition. “Ninety per cent of customers would not pay data exit costs”, because the provider has taken these two measures.

Egress fees, procedure to follow

Large customers wishing to leave AWS will need to ask their account manager about the procedure to follow when the volume of data exceeds 100 GB per month.

“It’s necessary to go through support, because you make hundreds of millions of data transfers every day, and we generally don’t know whether the data transferred to the internet is part of your normal business or whether it’s a one-off transfer as part of a switch to another cloud or on-premise service provider,” justifies Sébastien Stormacq.

AWS will review requests at the account level. Once approved, the hyperscaler will provide credits for the data being migrated. “We are not asking you to close your account or change your relationship with AWS in any way. You can come back at any time!”

Freedom of choice is not limited to data transfer rates, as AWS also supports fair software licensing principles, which make it easier to use software with other IT providers of the customer’s choice.

Ahead of the Data Act

The exemption from charges for transferring data to the Internet also follows the direction set by the European Data Act. The Data Act, which is due to come into force in September 2025, contains a number of stipulations on how customer data is managed, shared and accessed.

One of these measures is designed to protect EU businesses from “unfair contract terms”, while another requires that they be allowed to switch between cloud providers without incurring additional costs. It is essentially designed to prevent so-called lock-in of cloud infrastructure providers.