Imagine you are about to rent a house for your family. You are thrilled because the house has everything you've always dreamed of. It is beautiful with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, one living room, and a fully equipped kitchen. It's the perfect place to live.
Now, imagine that your landlord charges you based on the city, the floor, the number of external windows, the number of rooms, and the square meters. This is normal, and you pay the landlord the agreed-upon fee. But when you receive the bill, there is a surprise: your landlord charges you every time you move from your room to the bathroom and every time you move from the kitchen to the living room. You say, "Why are you doing that?" He justifies it by saying that when moving from point A to point B, you're using the floor space. Of course, you complain and appeal because, firstly, he's monitoring everything you do in the house that you rented. This person knows where you are and is tracking your movements in the house. Secondly, you already paid for the entire house, so you shouldn't have to pay when you go from A to B because this is the house you paid for. You take the matter to court, and, of course, you win. This is a normal outcome.
This scenario sounds like a joke, but it happens in the cloud every day. All companies have to pay cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure fees just for using the space, fees for egress, and fees for moving data, for example, from a machine in one availability zone to another machine in a different availability zone. It sounds crazy, but it’s true. According to the 2023 DeVos report, nearly 80% of companies are in the public cloud. This means that four out of five companies are affected by this daily scam.
Recently, Google announced they have eliminated egress fees when you exit their cloud, allowing companies to leave for free. Typically, every cloud provider charges you if you want to leave. Let’s consider another case: imagine you have to pay $200 or $2000 to Gmail because you want to change to another email provider. You would think, "I am not going to pay that; this is a scam." But this is something that happens every day. When Basecamp, for example, left AWS, they had to pay between $700,000 just to take their data out.
Initially, cloud providers allowed free data ingress. The reason is simple: they want to get your data inside the cloud. But once you're inside, you need to pay when you want to leave. And even this isn’t the main problem. The main problem is that the cost is unpredictable. You have no idea how much you're going to pay because it depends on the region, the size, and many other factors. So it’s impossible to predict your monthly bill.
This practice is one of the biggest scams in history. A Cloudflare study shows that 7.5% to 27% of all cloud provider charges are for data transfer, amounting to billions of dollars annually. And when we say billions, we’re talking about almost $68 billion. But Cloudflare is not the only one who thinks this is a scam. The European Union Data Act set to enforce in 2024 aims to facilitate easier switching between cloud providers by removing barriers like egress fees. This is why Google Cloud reduced their egress fees to zero when you want to leave their cloud.
This isn’t the only point the European Union is considering. They are also examining how egress fees are reducing companies’ ability to grow in the cloud. Until the European Union takes action, companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft will continue to impose these charges, and we will have to pay them monthly.
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Top comments (1)
Great analogy.
Here’s to being hopeful Basecamp got a refund after AWS and Azure followed suit (no data transfer out fees!)
Also, I think you might need a bigger analogy to get into the inter-regional, inter-continental, or provider backbone egress fees 🤭