Google Ends Cloud Switching Fees, Pressuring Amazon and Microsoft (bloomberg.com) 12
An anonymous reader shares a report: The cost of switching between cloud-computing providers has long drawn complaints, with the services derided as "roach motels" that let businesses check in but not out. Now Google is taking steps to change that. Effective immediately, the company is eliminating fees levied on customers who want to leave its cloud for a rival service -- a policy shift that may pressure competitors Amazon and Microsoft to do the same.
The move follows intensifying scrutiny of cloud services by regulators and lawmakers around the world. UK antitrust authorities launched a probe that is looking at such penalties, and the fees emerged as a key issue when the US Federal Trade Commission asked for public comments on a variety of cloud concerns. Google Vice President Amit Zavery, who helps oversee the cloud business, said switching fees only represent about 2% of the total costs of migrating to a new provider -- and don't deter many clients from moving their data.
The move follows intensifying scrutiny of cloud services by regulators and lawmakers around the world. UK antitrust authorities launched a probe that is looking at such penalties, and the fees emerged as a key issue when the US Federal Trade Commission asked for public comments on a variety of cloud concerns. Google Vice President Amit Zavery, who helps oversee the cloud business, said switching fees only represent about 2% of the total costs of migrating to a new provider -- and don't deter many clients from moving their data.
still have an data transfer fees in and out for (Score:2)
still have an data transfer fees in and out for data used in your cloud for day to day use as well.
This should be a no brainer (Score:3)
This should be a no brainer.. "Moving out fees" are abusive billing practices that should be Illegal. Excepting obviously the fair cost of additional resources necessary to migrate out -- If you uploaded 1000TB to a cloud provider and want to use the network service to export 1000TB of that data out from the provider: the network transfer out at a high data rate obviously costs the provider something to deliver, and shouldn't become completely free just bc of the special goal to transfer providers; It should just be Illegal for providers to price bulk transfer out at an excessive rate, and there are a variety of data sources outside cloud providers that can be used to calculate what a fair rate is for such transfer resources.
The other possible exception is someone committed to purchase a certain quantity of service for a certain period of time in order to receive a volume discount for reserving/building dedicated resources for that customer with an Explicit agreement of the time period, and changed your mind wanting out early. Then obviously you should be due to still pay your minimum commitment for the rest of that term even if you don't use the service; That's like a landlord's tenant breaking a lease for a rental property --- excluding cases where the service doesn't meet expectations, and you can prove the service doesn't match the quality the sales people promised, and you feel need to cancel - the provider should be due to credit the customer that for poor service, however (The costs of bad service for IT stuff can well exceed the value of that commit)..
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Ok, yeah... License-based restrictions against running your software on a cloud server instance dedicated to you; just because the underlying hardware belongs to a different cloud provider; is also Unfair to competing providers and should also be Illegal, imo. If you're allowed to run it on your own equipment, then a cloud instance dedicated to your organization should be able to be legally defined as your equipment. It should not be legal to tie a license to ownership of hardware in one insta
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With respect to licenses most vendors were pretty good. Microsoft and VMware let you port your licenses, even for DR.
This applies for BYOL models. If you buy the license in a subscription model through the cloud provider maybe that is different. But if you intend to run the software regardless of the provider why wouldn't you want to be in control of those licenses?
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> This should be a no brainer.. "Moving out fees" are abusive billing practices that should be Illegal.
Technically they weren't moving out or migration fees they were general egress fees. So even day to day operations that egressed data, whether it was a migration or not, was charged.
The fact they charge for egress but not ingress is sketchy. And only further compounded by policies like Azure Backup waves the egress fees for restores, etc.
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The fact they charge for egress but not ingress is sketchy.
This kind of makes sense for Amazon as a hoster.. Amazon is a large company, but they're not a Tier-1 backbone, So
they still have to negotiate with various transit partners and peering partners for internet connectivity, And in regards to Internet peering It's whichever side Sends more traffic than they receive ends up paying. That is if we're supposedly Peers at an internet exchange, And 75% of the traffic on that link is You sending me data,
We are # 3 but we try harder (Score:2)
This reminds me of the old Avis commercial. Isn't Google Cloud # 3 ?
If so, I doubt Amazon will eliminate the fees and maybe the same for Microsoft, no reason to. Now IBM, I think if IBM has fees, they will join Google in this elimination.
As if data transfer fees mattered (Score:4, Interesting)
Google says this as if data transfer fees were a meaningful part of anyone's move-out equation. The lock-in is the Google-specific, Amazon-specific and Microsoft-specific services you built your application to depend on which aren't available in the other cloud. If you weren't cautious about what your devs used, rewriting your application to use generic services available anywhere can be an unbounded cost.