[uptownfunk]

AFAIK this is pretty much the moat collapsing on big cloud. That said you still have to contact them for it so not truly free movement. Once it becomes truly free to move data out things will get interesting. The stock market didn’t really seem to care that much which was surprising.

[ckdarby]

I think AWS doesn't truly care. They've probably internally planned for the day when egress cost billing would be chipped away and have been planning. It is a total cash cow and huge boast on margins for them, but they've been taking that money over the years and diversifying into managed services.

The managed services are expensive, but boy do they work well. Over the last couple years been running +100 each of managed elastic searches, RDS, and firehouse with minimal to no issues.

[bklyn11201]

Exactly correct. AWS has a giant suite of services, and if they are forced to reduce egress charges, they would raise prices on other services to keep their margins consistent. The market knows this and thus why the market doesn't react to non-news like this.

An interesting question: why does AWS charge so much for egress knowing that it could dissuade some currently-on-prem use cases? It definitely forces optimization, use of CDNs, compression, etc. Previously it likely reduced transfers to another provider, but as the parent alludes to, the use of managed services makes sticking to AWS much more likely. What else?

[amluto]

> they would raise prices on other services to keep their margins consistent. The market knows this and thus why the market doesn't react to non-news like this.

I’m unconvinced. A lot of money is spent on third party services (think Snowflake, but there are a ton) where the third party service is offered in AWS, GCP, and Azure. There is no on-the-Internet option.

If egress fees go away, on-the-Internet becomes appealing, and there goes a lot of revenue. If fees for other services go up, on-the-Internet becomes even more appealing.

[uptownfunk]

Because eventually there is no difference in managed service from gcp oci msft, so when data egress cost doesn’t matter you can use any providers service. The margins will get worn away since there’s no longer high switching cost.

[uptownfunk]

AWS internally has a very strong allergy to raising prices. If anything there is generally pressure to reduce prices.

[bklyn11201]

There are all sorts of ways for AWS to raise prices without explicitly raising the price for an r7g.x64:

1) Starting charging legacy fees like the MySQL 5.7 fees 2) Start charging for hits, IO, etc 3) Tier out fees like with Aurora IO optimized to increase revenue 4) Push support levers 5) Stop reducing prices for older instance models