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It is a truth universally acknowledged that egress fees the rates hyperscalers charge customers to move data from one cloud to another suck. Enterprise customers hate them and cloud competitors claim they harm competition. But could they finally be on the way out the door?

NeXt Curve founder Leonard Lee thinks so, but not everyone is so sure.

In a surprise move, Google Cloud recently decided to eliminate egress fees for customers leaving Google Cloud Platform. The catch is that this applies only to customers exiting Googles cloud entirely and even then only to a handful of its services. These include its data warehouse and storage products, including BigQuery, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Datastore, Filestore, Spanner and Persistent Disk.

A Google Cloud representative told Silverlinings the move provides choice for customers in a cross-cloud world.

Lee thinks the change could mark the start of a new trend which will be driven by rising pressure from large enterprise customers.

Organizations are starting to realize that control of their data, the environments and the data paths are increasingly important, he told Silverlinings. Those with multi-cloud strategies want to be able to place data near workloads where they are best served across a portfolio of cloud service providers they retain. The egress fees present walls to gardens they would rather not be confined to.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft and Oracle all charge egress fees. Pricing tends to be charged on a sliding scale based on the amount of data transferred.

For instance, AWS offers the first 100GB of data egress from its S3 service for free, but charges 9 cents for 100 to 10,000 GB, 8 cents for 10,000 to 50,000 GB and 7 cents for 50,000 to 150,000 GB.

While this doesnt sound like a lot, transfers can quickly run into the hundreds or thousands of dollars. In a June 2023 filing with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Oracle claimed it would cost upwards of $23,000 to transfer 500 TB of data out of Azure and as much as $40,000 out of Google Cloud (though Oracle noted AWS fees are higher than everyone elses for workloads of any other size).

Oracle argued the sole purpose of egress fees is to frustrate competition on the merits by locking in customers to their legacy CSP.

Cloudflare has also been campaigning against egress fees for years now, claiming in 2021 the markups associated with them were wildly egregious and designed to lock customers in to their infrastructure.

An AWS representative contended in a statement to Silverliningsthat "over 90% of our customers pay nothing for data transfers out of AWS because we provide them with 100 gigabytes per month for free to use for any purpose."

The rep added that in compliance with the European Data Act, AWS can only charge eligible European Union customers enough to recoup its own costs to support switching or parallel use in other relevant clouds.

In response to questions about whether it plans to eliminate egress fees, the spokesperson also pointed to AWS' own filing with the FTC, in which it argued "Compensating providers for the substantial cost of transferring data and building and operating a complex and expensive network is the only way to facilitate large-scale data transfer of the kind customers demand."

Silverlinings reached out to Microsoft but the company declined to comment andOracle did not respond to a requestfor comment by press time.

While NeXt Curve's Lee was hopeful aboutegress fees making an exit, not everyone is as optimistic.

Sid Nag, VP of Gartners Technology and Service Provider group, told Silverlinings that Google Cloud's supposed "elimination" of egress fees isn't as straightforward as it sounds.

In addition to only applying to data stored in certain services, Nag pointed out thatcustomers exiting Google Cloud have to apply to have their egress fees waived. If they get the green light, they have to finish their migration in 60 days and will receive a credit on their final bill covering the fee amount.

This 60-day time limit is a huge hurdle, noted Nag. And while Google Cloud makes onboarding easy, it's not clear what resources the cloud provider will make available to expedite the egress process.

"Exiting a cloud is not for the faint of heart. Its not a decision you make suddenly, and its also done incrementally over a significant period of time," he said. "So, I think the 60-day thing will be really interesting."

He added that Google Cloud is notablykeepingegress fees in place for active customers with multi-cloud environments, which is likely due to the fact thatthere are real network costs associated with transferring data and implies that perhaps some sort of hardware think along the lines of a giant thumb drive will be used for exiting customers, allowing Google Cloud to waive those egress costs without losing money.

That said, a quick read of Google Cloud's blog on the announcement makes it apparent that egress feesaren't really at the heart of its move, according to Nag.

Amit Zavery, GM/VP, Head of Platform, for Google Cloud, wrote: "Eliminating data transfer fees ... does not solve the fundamental issue that prevents many customers from working with their preferred cloud provider in the first place: restrictive and unfair licensing practices."

Nag said the connection between egress fees and licensing practices isnt clear. But what is clear is that Google Cloud is trying to use the attention gleaned from its move to highlight an issue it truly cares about.

"Microsoft charges higher licensing fees for their software torun on a foreign cloud than if it was running on their own Azure Cloudand they [Google Cloud] want to highlight that problem by doing this move," he said.

Egress fees, Nag concluded, are "definitely not going away."

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Are cloud egress fees on the way out? Maybe. - Silverlinings