9 ms·

Removing data transfer fees when moving off Google Cloud

404 points by LukeLambert 3y ago

ShakataGaNai 3y ago
That's a cool thing for them to do, an interesting business choice, but cool. It certainly helps the companies feel a little better about vendor lock-in, which is terribly plentiful in the cloud. 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::.
- diggan 3y ago
  > 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. 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.
- kentonv 3y ago
  Sounds like they're trying to technically address EU regulators' concerns without providing any real value to customers. 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.
  - thrtythreeforty 3y ago
    Yep, for a sufficiently large account, this strikes me as an offer they know will never be taken. "Migrating" typically means "stopping $XXX,XXX spend per month" not "completely ceasing use of all GCE services." They know this and this is mainly marketing, I think.
    - op00to 3y ago
      You migrate use cases, not entire environments!
andersa 3y ago
I bet there's some new regulation being implemented here that they just happened to forget to mention in the post.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Why's that?
  - andersa 3y ago
    Large cloud providers don't do things out of the good in their hearts, but they sure like to pretend so whenever they are forced to improve something.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      They might just be doing it to be competitive.
loosescrews 3y ago
> Certain legacy providers leverage their on-premises software monopolies to create cloud monopolies, using restrictive licensing practices that lock in customers and warp competition. I like to see them publicly call out Microsoft and Oracle.
- SteveNuts 3y ago
  I think the "Legacy" and "licensing" portions are specifically calling out MS and Oracle, but they very sneakily are calling AWS out too on the fact that egress makes it insanely expensive to leave their platform. 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.
  - zinekeller 3y ago
    You don't need the "I think" for Microsoft: while not mentioned directly, the links on "unfair legacy software" points to Microsoft.
    - pyuser583 3y ago
      Oracle is what popped into my mind.
      - networkchad 3y ago
        [dead]
  - dspillett 3y ago
    > but they very sneakily are calling AWS out too 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.
deleted 3y ago
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seatac76 3y ago
Getting ahead of antitrust I see. Big tech has gotten so big that we will now see this peace meal stuff being done to appease regulators to stave off any major action.
- trhway 3y ago
  don't think so. Google is the distant 3rd in the Cloud, so hardly a subject to antitrust. It is more likely that failing hard on their goals for the Cloud set to that division about 3 years ago (and it was rumored that either they achieve the goals or it is "or else" for the Cloud division) they are starting the blame game whining about licensing/unfair competition/etc. (whereis they should blame only themselves as they would never bend over to the enterprise customer like say AWS would do who for example developed MS SQL (Transact SQL) interface to their own db - that is how you deal with the competition and software lock-in instead of whining (reminds that phrase from Babel - "that is why Benja is the king, while we are sitting on the cemetery fence"). In this case for example I remember how AWS was hunting down laid off Sybase (where T-SQL comes from) engineers whereis being an experienced enterprise software developer is viewed by Google is more like a disadvantage and results in meager offer (several my acquaintances had similar experience), so GCP losing enterprise game doesn't look that surprising to me. And now that enterprise customers are starting to add huge AI related workloads the GCP is hardly ever mentioned)
- kaonwarb 3y ago
  Google Cloud has ~10% market share; I don't think this is an antitrust avoidance play. More likely, it's removing a concern companies might have with bringing workloads onto a relatively smaller player. Especially one that has a history of discontinuing products.
  - SteveNuts 3y ago
    > Especially one that has a history of discontinuing products. Let's just hope this isn't step 1 for their plan to do exactly that.
  - aaomidi 3y ago
    The issue isn't as much market share as it is how sticky picking a cloud platform is. At that point the market share doesn't really matter, especially if your name is Google.
Mortiffer 3y ago
but i guess this won't impact Google Cloud Storage egress fee
- CobrastanJorji 3y ago
  That is exactly what this impacts, if you're leaving Google Cloud.
jdon 3y ago
Looks like it's a response to the recent cloud services market investigation by the CMA [1]. 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-investigation https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/cloud-services-market-investiga... [2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/652e958b6972600014ccf9f6/Issues_statement__updated.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/652e958b69726...
- jiveturkey 3y ago
  I don't see it that way at all. Those egregious egress charges still apply while you are actively using GCP, encouraging you to put everything in GCP, and eschew multicloud. 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.
  - oh_sigh 3y ago
    It could also be a method to put pressure on AWS to get rid of their egress fees. 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.
    - donalhunt 3y ago
      This. I see this as purely an attempt to influence AWS in lowering the barriers of migrating between clouds. But also makes sense for those who want the option to test the waters with no downside.
- blibble 3y ago
  I read through a couple of these responses to the CMA by MS, Google and AWS and their smaller competitors 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
skywhopper 3y ago
At face value this is a good thing, but I gotta say it’s pretty rich for Google to try to diss other cloud vendors for leveraging their effective monopolies given its moves in search and now browsers. Sorry, but GCP doesn’t get a pass on Google’s other behavior just because currently a loser in the cloud infra market.
xnx 3y ago
When you don't have many customers [as AWS] there's much less to lose by eliminating these fees. Also makes AWS look bad by comparison. Smart move.
gnfargbl 3y ago
So on the one hand Google now accepts that egress fees are outrageous. Great! On the other hand, they're only reducing (removing) the fees when you leave them. 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.
- vineyardmike 3y ago
  Unless they’re planning to kill GCP entirely. Then everyone is a departing customer /s 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.
  - gnfargbl 3y ago
    > ingress/egress isn’t probably too problematic 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.
- Patrick_Devine 3y ago
  Google is part of Cloudflare's Bandwidth Alliance [1] which is removing most egress fees. Google still charges for egress, but it's half of what AWS is charging. We moved everything off of S3 anyway and have been using Cloudflare's R2 storage along with Google Compute Engine instances. R2 can be a little flaky, but the cost savings for us more than makes up for it. [1] https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/
ado__dev 3y ago
Good move. I still feel that the egress fees charged by the big 3 are way too high.
deleted 3y ago
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hiroshi3110 3y ago
Good move, but if you have data in GCS colder than nearline it may cost you still.
pwarner 3y ago
Egress fees are way too high. And it doesn't keep anyone in cloud, if you want to move out, you do it. In fact, I think the fear of egress costs keeps more people OUT of cloud than it keeps people in. This is a smart move that won't cost them anything and may increase their business.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  I know plenty of companies who can't afford the Aws egress fees to get their data out of Aws, and it's far cheaper to just pay storage for one more month and kick the can down the road.
londons_explore 3y ago
The process seems a bit cumbersome... 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.
- arccy 3y ago
  your suggestion sounds more cumbersome (and probably refunds less)
- Kwpolska 3y ago
  The process requires people to be aware of the offer and contact support. A few months down the road, nobody will remember this exists, so most migrations won't actually make use of it.
hipadev23 3y ago
Wait so if I close my GCP account I get free egress, if I stay I don't?
andrewstuart 3y ago
The cynical might wonder if this is a precursor to Google closing down its cloud. 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.
- mgfist 3y ago
  Shutting down a $30B+ business would be such a ridiculous, yet Google-esque decision. It would also be a huge shame for consumers - the public cloud is already an Oligopoly
  - indrora 3y ago
    There's always Oracle (/s)
- xeonmc 3y ago
  another Google product bites the dust
- Sebb767 3y ago
  > They can't really shut Google Cloud down and still be charging people to exit. I'm not quite sure about this. Obviously they don't do it now, but I wouldn't have put it beyond them.
- joeldo 3y ago
  Closing down within a year of it finally becoming profitable.. That would be a plot twist!
  - justinclift 3y ago
    But also not out of the question for Google, who don't seem at all rational about what they kill vs let live.
asylteltine 3y ago
I’m betting we will see GCP added to the list of killed by Google in 2025.
- willsmith72 3y ago
  i'll take the other side of that bet. the cloud industry is a huge money-maker and not going anywhere
andrewstuart 3y ago
This whole story is very strange. 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.
- justinclift 3y ago
  Hmmm, I'm not seeing many positive comments here about Google. Maybe I started reading a lot later than you? :)
otterley 3y ago
The fine print: https://cloud.google.com/exit-cloud 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
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  That all sounds pretty reasonable.
- cobertos 3y ago
  I clicked the link and you have to _apply_ and potentially be admitted just to get a free exit? So there's no guarantee?? 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.
QuinnyPig 3y ago
Hi. I fix AWS bills for a living and also shitpost a lot. 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.
- danielvaughn 3y ago
  Ok that's reassuring. The way it was worded made me think that GCP was headed to the Google graveyard, as wild as that would be.
- btown 3y ago
  > also shitpost a lot The parent poster https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig 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 :)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- xer 3y ago
  I share the view that nobody avoids an exit or migration because of egress fees. In fact, for online migrations the period of replicating data between providers might go on for months. 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.
danpalmer 3y ago
Looking forward to "egress fees for leaving GCP" being added to Killed By Google (in a personal capacity, unrelated to my work).
AtNightWeCode 3y ago
Egress bandwidth costs have been discounted for years. Including GCP. Bandwidth Alliance... Like 10 years ago traffic cost was a real problem with the cloud. Today there are other areas that are expensive.
anyoneamous 3y ago
I love that Google are willing to such a big swing at Microsoft in the text of this announcement - I just wish AWS wasn't so badly shackled busy it's marketing and PR people these days.
- plantain 3y ago
  I thought it was Oracle they were swinging at.
frankfrank13 3y ago
[flagged]
dilyevsky 3y ago
In europe they will not be able to charge egress at all starting next year i think. I wonder if that’s related development
bredren 3y ago
> Certain legacy providers leverage their on-premises software monopolies to create cloud monopolies, using restrictive licensing practices that lock in customers and warp competition. 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.
_cenw 3y ago
The audacity of ranting about some cloud provider leveraging their licensing and then dropping a link to Azure in the next sentence, I love it, thanks Google.
6nf 3y ago
RIP Google Cloud calling it now
- flanked-evergl 3y ago
  Let's hope not, most of their business will move to Azure, and is that ever a dumpster fire.
  - bob1029 3y ago
    I think Azure is great if you are willing to do it Microsoft's way and are focused on B2B markets where factors like compliance matter in a way that can actually disrupt your sales cycle. 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.
  - reciprocity 3y ago
    Describing Azure as a dumpster fire doesn't strike you as hyperbolic? Could you elaborate?
    - flanked-evergl 3y ago
      Almost everything from Azure is half broken, e.g. Bicep which they keep pushing.

404 points by LukeLambert 3y ago

That's a cool thing for them to do, an interesting business choice, but cool. It certainly helps the companies feel a little better about vendor lock-in, which is terribly plentiful in the cloud. 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::.

diggan 3y ago
> 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. 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.
kentonv 3y ago
Sounds like they're trying to technically address EU regulators' concerns without providing any real value to customers. 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.
- thrtythreeforty 3y ago
  Yep, for a sufficiently large account, this strikes me as an offer they know will never be taken. "Migrating" typically means "stopping $XXX,XXX spend per month" not "completely ceasing use of all GCE services." They know this and this is mainly marketing, I think.
  - op00to 3y ago
    You migrate use cases, not entire environments!

andersa 3y ago

I bet there's some new regulation being implemented here that they just happened to forget to mention in the post.

robertlagrant 3y ago
Why's that?
- andersa 3y ago
  Large cloud providers don't do things out of the good in their hearts, but they sure like to pretend so whenever they are forced to improve something.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    They might just be doing it to be competitive.

loosescrews 3y ago

SteveNuts 3y ago
I think the "Legacy" and "licensing" portions are specifically calling out MS and Oracle, but they very sneakily are calling AWS out too on the fact that egress makes it insanely expensive to leave their platform. 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.
- zinekeller 3y ago
  You don't need the "I think" for Microsoft: while not mentioned directly, the links on "unfair legacy software" points to Microsoft.
  - pyuser583 3y ago
    Oracle is what popped into my mind.
    - networkchad 3y ago
      [dead]
- dspillett 3y ago
  > but they very sneakily are calling AWS out too 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.

deleted 3y ago

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seatac76 3y ago

Getting ahead of antitrust I see. Big tech has gotten so big that we will now see this peace meal stuff being done to appease regulators to stave off any major action.

trhway 3y ago
don't think so. Google is the distant 3rd in the Cloud, so hardly a subject to antitrust. It is more likely that failing hard on their goals for the Cloud set to that division about 3 years ago (and it was rumored that either they achieve the goals or it is "or else" for the Cloud division) they are starting the blame game whining about licensing/unfair competition/etc. (whereis they should blame only themselves as they would never bend over to the enterprise customer like say AWS would do who for example developed MS SQL (Transact SQL) interface to their own db - that is how you deal with the competition and software lock-in instead of whining (reminds that phrase from Babel - "that is why Benja is the king, while we are sitting on the cemetery fence"). In this case for example I remember how AWS was hunting down laid off Sybase (where T-SQL comes from) engineers whereis being an experienced enterprise software developer is viewed by Google is more like a disadvantage and results in meager offer (several my acquaintances had similar experience), so GCP losing enterprise game doesn't look that surprising to me. And now that enterprise customers are starting to add huge AI related workloads the GCP is hardly ever mentioned)
kaonwarb 3y ago
Google Cloud has ~10% market share; I don't think this is an antitrust avoidance play. More likely, it's removing a concern companies might have with bringing workloads onto a relatively smaller player. Especially one that has a history of discontinuing products.
- SteveNuts 3y ago
  > Especially one that has a history of discontinuing products. Let's just hope this isn't step 1 for their plan to do exactly that.
- aaomidi 3y ago
  The issue isn't as much market share as it is how sticky picking a cloud platform is. At that point the market share doesn't really matter, especially if your name is Google.

Mortiffer 3y ago

but i guess this won't impact Google Cloud Storage egress fee

CobrastanJorji 3y ago
That is exactly what this impacts, if you're leaving Google Cloud.

jdon 3y ago

Looks like it's a response to the recent cloud services market investigation by the CMA [1]. 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-investigation https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/cloud-services-market-investiga... [2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/652e958b6972600014ccf9f6/Issues_statement__updated.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/652e958b69726...

jiveturkey 3y ago
I don't see it that way at all. Those egregious egress charges still apply while you are actively using GCP, encouraging you to put everything in GCP, and eschew multicloud. 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.
- oh_sigh 3y ago
  It could also be a method to put pressure on AWS to get rid of their egress fees. 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.
  - donalhunt 3y ago
    This. I see this as purely an attempt to influence AWS in lowering the barriers of migrating between clouds. But also makes sense for those who want the option to test the waters with no downside.
blibble 3y ago
I read through a couple of these responses to the CMA by MS, Google and AWS and their smaller competitors 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

skywhopper 3y ago

At face value this is a good thing, but I gotta say it’s pretty rich for Google to try to diss other cloud vendors for leveraging their effective monopolies given its moves in search and now browsers. Sorry, but GCP doesn’t get a pass on Google’s other behavior just because currently a loser in the cloud infra market.

xnx 3y ago

When you don't have many customers [as AWS] there's much less to lose by eliminating these fees. Also makes AWS look bad by comparison. Smart move.

gnfargbl 3y ago

So on the one hand Google now accepts that egress fees are outrageous. Great! On the other hand, they're only reducing (removing) the fees when you leave them. 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.

vineyardmike 3y ago
Unless they’re planning to kill GCP entirely. Then everyone is a departing customer /s 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.
- gnfargbl 3y ago
  > ingress/egress isn’t probably too problematic 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.
Patrick_Devine 3y ago
Google is part of Cloudflare's Bandwidth Alliance [1] which is removing most egress fees. Google still charges for egress, but it's half of what AWS is charging. We moved everything off of S3 anyway and have been using Cloudflare's R2 storage along with Google Compute Engine instances. R2 can be a little flaky, but the cost savings for us more than makes up for it. [1] https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/

ado__dev 3y ago

Good move. I still feel that the egress fees charged by the big 3 are way too high.

deleted 3y ago

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hiroshi3110 3y ago

Good move, but if you have data in GCS colder than nearline it may cost you still.

pwarner 3y ago

Egress fees are way too high. And it doesn't keep anyone in cloud, if you want to move out, you do it. In fact, I think the fear of egress costs keeps more people OUT of cloud than it keeps people in. This is a smart move that won't cost them anything and may increase their business.

londons_explore 3y ago
I know plenty of companies who can't afford the Aws egress fees to get their data out of Aws, and it's far cheaper to just pay storage for one more month and kick the can down the road.

londons_explore 3y ago

The process seems a bit cumbersome... 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.

arccy 3y ago
your suggestion sounds more cumbersome (and probably refunds less)
Kwpolska 3y ago
The process requires people to be aware of the offer and contact support. A few months down the road, nobody will remember this exists, so most migrations won't actually make use of it.

hipadev23 3y ago

Wait so if I close my GCP account I get free egress, if I stay I don't?

andrewstuart 3y ago

The cynical might wonder if this is a precursor to Google closing down its cloud. 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.

mgfist 3y ago
Shutting down a $30B+ business would be such a ridiculous, yet Google-esque decision. It would also be a huge shame for consumers - the public cloud is already an Oligopoly
- indrora 3y ago
  There's always Oracle (/s)
xeonmc 3y ago
another Google product bites the dust
Sebb767 3y ago
> They can't really shut Google Cloud down and still be charging people to exit. I'm not quite sure about this. Obviously they don't do it now, but I wouldn't have put it beyond them.
joeldo 3y ago
Closing down within a year of it finally becoming profitable.. That would be a plot twist!
- justinclift 3y ago
  But also not out of the question for Google, who don't seem at all rational about what they kill vs let live.

asylteltine 3y ago

I’m betting we will see GCP added to the list of killed by Google in 2025.

willsmith72 3y ago
i'll take the other side of that bet. the cloud industry is a huge money-maker and not going anywhere

andrewstuart 3y ago

This whole story is very strange. 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.

justinclift 3y ago
Hmmm, I'm not seeing many positive comments here about Google. Maybe I started reading a lot later than you? :)

otterley 3y ago

The fine print: https://cloud.google.com/exit-cloud 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

robertlagrant 3y ago
That all sounds pretty reasonable.
cobertos 3y ago
I clicked the link and you have to _apply_ and potentially be admitted just to get a free exit? So there's no guarantee?? 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.

QuinnyPig 3y ago

Hi. I fix AWS bills for a living and also shitpost a lot. 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.

danielvaughn 3y ago
Ok that's reassuring. The way it was worded made me think that GCP was headed to the Google graveyard, as wild as that would be.
btown 3y ago
> also shitpost a lot The parent poster https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig 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 :)
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xer 3y ago
I share the view that nobody avoids an exit or migration because of egress fees. In fact, for online migrations the period of replicating data between providers might go on for months. 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.

danpalmer 3y ago

Looking forward to "egress fees for leaving GCP" being added to Killed By Google (in a personal capacity, unrelated to my work).

AtNightWeCode 3y ago

Egress bandwidth costs have been discounted for years. Including GCP. Bandwidth Alliance... Like 10 years ago traffic cost was a real problem with the cloud. Today there are other areas that are expensive.

anyoneamous 3y ago

I love that Google are willing to such a big swing at Microsoft in the text of this announcement - I just wish AWS wasn't so badly shackled busy it's marketing and PR people these days.

plantain 3y ago
I thought it was Oracle they were swinging at.

frankfrank13 3y ago

[flagged]

dilyevsky 3y ago

In europe they will not be able to charge egress at all starting next year i think. I wonder if that’s related development

bredren 3y ago

> Certain legacy providers leverage their on-premises software monopolies to create cloud monopolies, using restrictive licensing practices that lock in customers and warp competition. 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.

_cenw 3y ago

The audacity of ranting about some cloud provider leveraging their licensing and then dropping a link to Azure in the next sentence, I love it, thanks Google.

6nf 3y ago

RIP Google Cloud calling it now

flanked-evergl 3y ago
Let's hope not, most of their business will move to Azure, and is that ever a dumpster fire.
- bob1029 3y ago
  I think Azure is great if you are willing to do it Microsoft's way and are focused on B2B markets where factors like compliance matter in a way that can actually disrupt your sales cycle. 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.
- reciprocity 3y ago
  Describing Azure as a dumpster fire doesn't strike you as hyperbolic? Could you elaborate?
  - flanked-evergl 3y ago
    Almost everything from Azure is half broken, e.g. Bicep which they keep pushing.