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Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has announced it will annul data egress charges for customers that say they want to leave the cloud provider.

However, the move is explicitly aimed at customers that will move away from Google. That means there are limits to who might benefit, with concerns over the time period allowed to migrate data off Googles systems.

Having said that, the small print also suggests customers that do not fulfil the headline criteria may be able to take advantage of no egress charges.

We look at what Google is actually offering.

Ordinarily, all outward cloud traffic termed egress in cloud storage is invoiced by quantity of data downloaded, whether back to an on-site location, elsewhere to another application, or to another cloud.

GCPs move now allows it to stand apart from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure by not making such a charge, but only in certain very specific circumstances.

In a notice posted last week, GCP told customers that if they want to quit Google and not have to pay egress fees as they do, they must fill out the Google Cloud Exit form.

Following that, Google will review the request and let them know when they can download their data without charge, being very clear it is in anticipation of terminating [the] Google Cloud agreement. After that, the customer has 60 days to migrate their data.

So, the key stipulation is that to take advantage of the waiving of egress fees, the customer must have declared they want to leave GCP.

To do so, they have to fill in a form under the Google Cloud Exit programme. After that, the Google team responsible will tell the customer when they can initiate the migration, and thats when the 60-day limit applies.

The offer only applies to customers on the Premium Tier Network Service Tier, and Google reserves the right to audit customer movement of data away from Google Cloud to ensure compliance with terms and conditions.

Having said that, the Google FAQ says its team will review cases where customers want to migrate some of their data and dont want to leave Google Cloud.

Google doesnt elaborate on what that means, but for some customers, perhaps it means that if they have the leverage, they might be able to convince Google to waive egress charges under other circumstances.

In waiving egress charges upon customer contract termination, GCP is conforming with a European measure voted in last summer under the framework of the Data Act that obliges cloud suppliers to facilitate data migration, particularly when they are constrained by contractual clauses imposed unilaterally.

This isnt a question of lowering costs for transfer of data out of Google Cloud in the framework of a classic use case, said Franois Denis, cloud consulting director for France-based integrator, Wenvision.

It does, in fact, apply only where the customer has stated that they plan to totally quit Google Cloud, for data hosted under certain services BigQuery, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Datastore, Filestore, Spanner, and Persistent Disk for customers of premium-level services, and that the offer has successfully passed validation by Google.

Denis said its an offer that looks like it puts Google in the vanguard and AWS and Azure may soon follow suit, but it is likely to benefit very few customers.

A duration of 60 days in the context of an infrastructure of reasonable size is actually quite short, said Denis. And in the context of a project that involves cloud egress, the most important costs arent those involved in leaving the cloud, but rather the actual migration costs themselves, such as technical details, planning, organisational change and building teams for the new environment.

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Googles data egress offer no such thing as a free migration? - ComputerWeekly.com