“AWS does not charge ‘egress fees’” Amazon has boldly claimed to the UK’s communications regulator Ofcom, which is consulting on whether to refer the the cloud services market to the competition watchdog – amid its concerns that “competition is being limited by market features that make it more difficult for customers to switch and use multiple suppliers.”
In an interim report published in April 2023, Ofcom took particular aim at “egress fees… the charges that customers pay to transfer their data out of a cloud” saying that “the hyperscalers set them significantly higher than most other providers” and warning that this could cause vendor lock-in.
That report came as critics and rivals have highlighted AWS’s data transfer pricing (“ludicrously complex” says one expert, Corey Quinn) – which can vary wildly across services, between and out of availability zones that may have been set up for high availability reasons, elastic IPs, VPCs, managed NAT gateways (used to let traffic egress from private subnets) etc.
