Microsoft the latest to waive cloud egress fees

TS&CS apply

Microsoft will no longer levy an egress charge when customers remove their data from Azure when to switch to another cloud provider or on-premises datacentre.

In a brief blog post, Microsoft said "We support customer choice, including the choice to migrate your data away from Azure."

The main impetus behind the move is the European Data Act, the enforcement of which in 2025 will target lock-in practices by cloud providers. However, the same terms apply to all Azure regions, not just Europe.

There is competitive pressure too, in that Google and AWS both announced recently that they would be waiving egress charges for certain users. There is also a growing customer demand for more flexibility and fewer barriers to switching providers.

However, some fairly restrictive Ts&Cs apply.

To qualify for free egress, customers must provide advance notice to Azure Support, remove data within 60 days, and cancel all Azure subscriptions associated with their account.

Free egress only applies to data transfer out via the internet, not through "specialised services" like ExpressRoute. Only egress charges from moving Azure Storage data out are eligible.

Microsoft already offers the first 100GB/month of egressed data for free, and the exact number of customers that will be able to take advantage of the new offer is uncertain.

Many larger customers will likely be using "specialised services" for data transfer, including Express Route, Express Route Direct, VPN, Azure Front Door, and Azure Content Delivery Network which are excluded. And the all-or-nothing approach of having to cancel all Azure subscriptions will rule it out for many.

Google's free egress, announced in January, is similarly restrictive. The company also has a 60-day egress window, it applies only to specific Google services, including BigQuery, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Datastore, Spanner, Filestore and Persistent Disk, and customers must also terminate their account on completion.

Of the "big three", AWS seemingly offers the most flexible terms for free egress. Customers will have 60 days to complete their data transfer once they are approved, and they can come back "at any time."

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

Computing says

It remains to be seen whether the moves will satisfy the European regulators—or the firms' customer bases, given the limited nature of the offerings. The requirement by Microsoft and Google to close accounts certainly takes us no closer to the ideal of multi-cloud, where data can be moved freely between providers, or to hybrid cloud where it can migrate to and from proprietary data centres to the cloud.

Google, the smallest of the three, was the first to move with arguably the most to gain, and the other two felt they had to follow suit. But their free egress offers seem begrudging and mostly window dressing at this stage, an opening gambit in negotiations with regulators.

Still, it is a welcome first step away from the cloud lock-in practices we've seen to this point.