AWS scraps egress fees for cloud migration

Joins Google, but Microsoft remains absent

AWS has announced it is waiving egress fees for customers looking to move to a new cloud provider.

The company has made the move to comply with the EU's Data Act, which came into force in January.

The Data Act stipulates that public and private cloud providers remove "obstacles to effective switching" between their own and competing cloud services, including egress fees.

Amazon's announcement makes little mention of the EU legislation, only noting that its move "follows the direction set by the European Data Act."

Most AWS customers - the company claims "over 90 percent" - already pay nothing to move data to a competitor, as they get 100GB of free egress per month, and 1TB out of Amazon CloudFront.

While that might be enough for day-to-day work, it wouldn't touch the sides of most cloud migrations. But, as of today, that's a concern of the past - if you contact AWS first.

It's important to tell AWS support that you are migrating so the company can apply the free data transfer out to the internet (DTO) rates. This, says AWS, is because "we generally do not know if the data transferred out to the internet is a normal part of your business or a one-time transfer as part of a switch to another cloud provider or on premises."

AWS has broken down all the steps needed to complete a migration here.

Customers will have 60 days to complete their data transfer once they are approved, and they can come back "at any time." That's a key difference between AWS and Google, which abolished egress fees earlier this year and requires customers to close their account entirely on leaving.

That said, AWS will (understandably) closely scrutinise any account that applies for free DTO rates multiple times.

With both AWS and Google providing free egress fees, the only one of the big three missing is Microsoft, the world's second-largest cloud provider. Both of its rivals have criticised the company in the past over its anti-competitive practices, calling on regulators to take action over what they see as a burgeoning monopoly.

A Microsoft spokesperson told The Register that the company had "nothing to share at this time" when asked about plans to follow suit.