Which highlighted "Egress fees harm competition by creating barriers to switching and multi-cloud leading to cloud service providers entrenching their position" [2].
It's also interesting that they are calling out problems with software licensing, as that is another thing the CMA is investigating in their cloud market review.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/cloud-services-market-investiga...
[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/652e958b69726...
as expected the hyperscalers refuse to acknowledge that the free ingress and expensive egress is a lock-in mechanism, and their smaller competitors complain bitterly about this
the hyperscalers say they have to charge egress fees to pay for the costs in building their networks, but for some reason doesn't apply to ingress (which they're silent on)
if they want to play this game then the CMA should simply make them charge the same for ingress and egress
that way they can "fund their network costs" without issue, and if they want to make them both free then that's their decision
This doesn’t pass the red face test IMO. The hyperscaler networks are indeed very expensive, but that’s because they need to provide non-blocking or near non-blocking performance within the availability zone, and the clouds don’t charge for this service.
The Internet egress part ought to be straightforward on top of this: plug as much bandwidth worth of connections into the aforementioned extremely fancy internal network. Configure routes accordingly.
It’s worth noting that the big clouds will sell you private links to your own facilities, and they charge for these links (which makes sense), but then they charge you for the traffic you send from inside the cloud to these links, which is absurd since they don’t charge for comparable traffic from inside the cloud to other systems in the same AZ.
The industry standard for peering is paying the 95th percentile of egress or ingress depending on whichever is greater. Ingress is free for these clouds because egress > ingress overall.
because ingress traffic volume is a fraction (in my experience, in website hosting of a well known household brand, barely 1%!) of egress traffic volume, and most peering connections are 1:1 in ingress/egress bandwidth so the egress bandwidth cost sets the price.
This seems to me more of a "try us out for free" play. Bring your big data here, if you end up not liking it, we won't penalize you for taking your data out. Given that GCP is running at a very distant 3rd, they need to make plays like this.
If it doesn't work - GCP looks a little better compared to AWS
If it does work, AWS users will have an easier time extricating themselves from the platform, and possibly going to GCP.
If they remove the fees, then competition might be pressured to do so (as a marketing response). Thus making it easier for people to switch to Google.
If this move were really about acting in customers' best interests, they would reduce the fees for everyone. Doing this only for departing customers feels performative.
Does it lose files? Fails to write but gives an error? Fails to read sometimes? Silently fails?
But seriously, it seems like a fair-ish compromise. The 60 day limit is tough though. As long as you’re continuing your usage and not using offsite backups, ingress/egress isn’t probably too problematic. It’s only problematic when you try to suddenly egress all data you’ve ever stored, which you probably wouldn’t do unless you’re migrating away.
It's problematic to me. I run a system partly on GCP and partly on another provider. I'd like to move some of the stuff that's on the other provider over to GCP VMs, but I am prevented from doing so solely by the GCP egress fees.
My general complaint is that high egress fees prevent users from developing hybrid cloud solutions which mix components from different cloud vendors. Instead, you are forced to choose a platform, and then you're locked into it. That seems textbook anti-competitive. We shouldn't be grateful for the opportunity to switch vendors, we should be angry that "choosing a single cloud vendor" is a thing at all.
They can't really shut Google Cloud down and still be charging people to exit.
And if they had suddenly seen the light on egress fees then surely they would have cut egress fees everywhere..... the fact that it's only on account closure is kinda suspicious.
I'm not quite sure about this. Obviously they don't do it now, but I wouldn't have put it beyond them.
All over the Internet people are slapping google on the back for..... pretty much nothing. In fact much of the praise seems to be worded as though Google had dropped all egress fees.
Google continues to charge the nothing-short-of-highway-robbery 12 cents per gigabyte unless you are in Australia in which case its 19 cents per gigabyte. This is astoundingly bad value.
What are people hailing Google's "free to exit" in such glowing terms. Even herein the comments people are cheering for Google.
Worth noting at this point that Cloudflare R2 charges 0 cents per gigabyte egress.
I like to see them publicly call out Microsoft and Oracle.
I've worked at some orgs where to either move their data out of S3 would cost $20k, or to even delete it would cost thousands in API calls.
raises eyebrow
It's a well-known trick (proposed by AWS Support as well) to set S3 lifecycle rules to empty buckets with too many objects to cycle through via List calls. Doesn't cost anything.
That, and any of the smaller “clouds” with egress/delete fees that need to be considered when leaving. Seems massively disingenuous given that until this announcement they also had such fees (“look, those people try rip you just like we were doing until five minutes ago!”) but that is pretty standard for marketing materials.
This makes them a better option as the first cloud provider to try, other things being equal, because leaving (back to on-prem or to another provider) is easier. I assume they are trying to remove a little of the huge the distance between them and the two leading players by reducing concerns that might add on-boarding friction.
Google should have made the same announcement without the snarky mean-spirited bitterness.
https://cloud.google.com/exit-cloud
* Free data transfers related to Google Cloud Exit are available on Premium Tier Network Service Tier
* Only data residing in Google Cloud data storage and data management products are covered
* You must report any changes to your migration timeline set out in your request form to the Google Cloud Support team
* You must submit your free data transfer request prior to the termination of your Google Cloud agreement
* Google Cloud reserves the right to audit movement of customers' data away from Google Cloud for compliance with program terms and conditions
Is requiring a Google committee review/application process a new trend with Google products? I recently was denied on another application through Google for API access to get one businesses GMB reviews, and it's frustrating because there's no recourse. Google is so opaque now.
Let's just hope this isn't step 1 for their plan to do exactly that.
I still feel that the egress fees charged by the big 3 are way too high.
Why not:
1. Migrate your data out.
2. Close your account.
3. You will automatically be refunded all network egress fees incurred in the final 60 days, capped at the number of gigabytes you had stored in our products in the preceding 60 days.
The TLDR is that when you tell them you want to cancel, you have 60 days to do so and during that time you'll have no egress fees. Makes sense.
Biggest problem though is... if you have a substantial amount of data or need to do a complex and seamless transition - this probably won't work for you. I would have to be on the DevOps team that's told to move a complicated and data-heavy application, and they only had 60 days to do so. Also the bulk of the data movement is, in my experience, one of the first steps of migration - not the last.
My hope is that, if nothing else, this will spur similar behaviors in other large cloud providers ::cough::aws::cough::.
In real life it's probably extremely unusual for any company to altogether cancel their Google Cloud contract. More likely is the scenario where you move the bulk of your cloud usage to a new provider, but still have various straggler infrastructure on the old one, which is not worth the effort to clean up. Or, you go to a multi-cloud strategy so you want to move half your data off Google but keep the other half around. Google's egress fees are still standing in the way of these cases.
They know this and this is mainly marketing, I think.
Couldn't you wait to tell Google until you've more or less figured out the logistics, then tell Google that you're leaving, fees for egress gets disabled and you initiate the move. Then you have 60 days to complete the move.
But yeah, if the move takes 30 days because you have a ton of data, and you figure out after the move is complete, that you missed 10%, you only have 30 days to figure out how to get that out too.
This is fine issue of its own. But the way it is laced up here muddies the waters around this actual news.
Google was doing the wrong thing and is changing that while not really taking responsibility for doing the wrong thing.
But to make that less obvious, this other concern is brought into the story creating this high ground on a separate topic.
The strategic reframing of corporate communications is tiring.
calling it now
Put differently, if you can get over the principled nerd stuff like "everything must be open" and break out that wallet, you can stand to make a lot of money without as much headache as the guy who decided to roll his own IdP.
Getting "cost sensitive" on Azure is how you lose track of the rabbit. The whole point in my view is to trade money for reduced complexity and time. It lets you focus on solving really hard business that others simply can't seem to find the time to.
This is a smart play that costs them basically nothing. Remember that egressing data costs customers at worst 3x the monthly cost of storing it. Nobody is avoiding leaving because of the egress fee.
What this does do is assuage the “lock-in” fear common in cloud-reluctant customers, while presents them as being forward thinking.
I’ve never heard of a cloud migration where the data egress wasn’t at least an order of magnitude less than the engineering cost of the migration itself.
The parent poster https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig is one of my favorite Twitter accounts. Every day he gives me renewed hope that, no matter how much I wish I had more time to devote to developer experience for people using the internal tools and APIs I design on the startup side of things... at least it'll be better than the DX and customer service provided by the biggest players providing infrastructure to our entire industry :)
But all cloud providers leverage The Principle of data locality or data gravity, which states that compute benefits from being close to the stored data. If a customer moves the data elsewhere it follows that the compute will soon leave too.
