[jewel]

I know of three ways to get data out of amazon's cloud. Whether they are the fastest depends on how much data you're talking about.

1) Download the data and pay egress bandwidth charges. Starts at $90/TB, but gets cheaper with more usage.

2) Use import/export snowball to have disks shipped to you. This is $30/TB + $250 per 80TB device.

3) Use direct connect to connect fiber directly to the region. Costs $1620/mo for each 10G line + $30/TB + an unknown amount to your fiber provider.

It's too bad that export traffic can't be marked as "low priority" with a cheaper cost. I imagine there are times at night when utilization is low and big export jobs could be run during those times. (It's obviously not in AWS's interest to make it cheap to get data out of their data centers.)