AWS expands free tier for data transfer
AWS has long been accused of keeping egress fees artificially high
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a massive expansion of its free tier for data transfer, increasing the amount of data that customers can transfer from the cloud to the internet, before they have to pay for the transfer.
AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr announced the change in a blog post, stating that the company is expanding the free tier from 1 GB to 100 GB per month for data transfer from AWS region to the internet. The expansion includes Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Elastic Load Balancing, and so forth
AWS GovCloud and AWS China Regions have been excluded from this free tier expansion.
For CloudFront, Amazon's content delivery network (CDN), data transfer is now free for up to 1 TB of data per month (up from 50 GB), and it is no longer restricted to the first 12 months after signup.
AWS is also increasing the number of free HTTP and HTTPS requests from 2,000,000 to 10,000,000. It says the offer of two million free CloudFront function invocations per month is no longer limited to the first year, and does not apply to data transfer from CloudFront PoPs in China.
The change will go into effect on 1st December, affecting "millions" of customers worldwide, according to AWS.
While Barr described the move as part of a "long tradition" of AWS lowering its prices, many industry experts believe the AWS decision is linked to competition from rival cloud providers, including Cloudflare which in September announced a new 'R2' Storage services, claiming that it would enable customers to avoid expensive outbound-data charges.
Egress charges, which are paid for removing data from the cloud, are normally the largest ongoing cost associated with cloud storage. Critics have long accused AWS of charging a hefty fee when customers move data out of cloud storage to external services. Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure also charge similar fees, which critics see as a tactic cloud firms use to lock customers in to their ecosystem.
Oracle and Cloudflare have taken aim at Amazon's costly data transfer fees in recent months, stating that the AWS charges "artificially high" fee from customers.
Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, said on Wednesday that Amazon's move to expand its free tier was "great news for our mutual customers".
"Well, that was fast!! I'm doing the dance of joy! Great news for our mutual customers," Prince tweeted. He described the decision as the "next step toward the inevitable end of cloud egress".
Gartner analyst Adam Ronthal said the real-world impact of AWS's decision is actually smaller than it might appear, and more like a "good publicity move".
Still, he noted that this was not the first time that Amazon's cloud arm had cut its prices.
Ronthal described AWS move "a small step" in the "right direction".
Mark Boost, CEO, Civo, commented: "You may have seen that AWS has announced it is slashing its data transfer fees. For Civo, this has not come soon enough."
"AWS's price reduction is a reflection of growing pressure that the big cloud providers are overcharging and underdelivering to users. Crucially, this is not the end of the story. AWS should not be under any illusion: big cloud providers still have a long way to address concerns from their customers.
"The winds of change are blowing through the cloud industry. But we need to see a fundamental rethink in how cloud services are delivered. Too many customers of the big cloud providers face the persistent fear of opaque billing practices and unexpected charges - a practice particularly damaging to smaller firms. There needs to be a renewed emphasis on transparency, with cloud providers delivering a simplified, reliable and cost-effective experience for customers."