In case you missed it, Google announced recently that they would be helping customers to avoid cloud lock-in by waiving egress charges. This has been grabbing many headlines with misleading statements such as ‘Google abolishes egress fees’. This is only a half truth, so lets explore this before you get a bill shock.
Firstly, and it deserves calling out on its own: Egress fees haven’t gone away.
Instead, now there is simply a scenario whereby Google might waive them. This scenario is for customers wishing to either leave Google Cloud Platform completely, or cease to use specific services. To be fair to Google, their headline doesn’t dress this up in a misleading way, as you can see for yourself: “Cloud switching just got easier: Removing data transfer fees when moving off Google Cloud“. Google spell it out right there in the title, but that’s just not as snazzy a headline I guess!
The article however still is deliberately light on some details. The story that Google spin is one of enabling freedom and preventing lock-in. I might be cynical, but it feels an attempt by Google to get ahead of the curve on the optics of public & regulatory perception with regards to Ofcom’s investigation into the state of ‘hyperscalers’ (the cloud services offered by Google, AWS, Microsoft), but that’s just my own speculation.
With this out of the way, what are the key facts that you need to know?
- Google Cloud Platform still charges egress fees
- Google Cloud Platform are willing to waive fees for customers wishing to stop consuming either the entirety of the Google Cloud Platform, or specific services that are within Google’s current scope.
- The scope of products that benefit from free egress are (as of time of writing): BigQuery, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Datastore, Filestore, Spanner, and Persistent Disk. At present Google are keeping the list here up to date with eligible services.
- If you have a Google Cloud Platform account manager/team you must contact them in the first instance.
- You must complete a form provided on this page before initiating the data transfer out of Google Cloud Platform.
- The Google Cloud Support team will notify you when you can begin your ‘free egress’. You’ll then have 60 days to complete your migration.
- There are extra caveats available to offer to migrate a portion of data, all of the available FAQs are on this page. The general mindset for the utilisation of this program however is that it should be treated as a ‘Google Cloud Platform Exit Migration’ not part of a continuous workflow to egress data to a secondary location, such as backup copies.
- The egress fees will still be calculated, listed, and invoiced. However the egress fees will subsequently be credited against any final bills.
In conclusion and as always, the cloud is a tool you can choose to use, but you need to be mindful of how to use it properly to get the maximum ‘bang-for-buck’. And it’s always worth reviewing the detail beyond the sensationalist headlines when its your, or your organisation’s money on the line to be lost.
