Why do you need to uncover your cloud egress fees?

The cloud revolution has approached organizations and enterprises across all industry verticals. While this transformation offers significant business advantages, it comes with associated costs that are not always apparent and can be quite unexpected.

In this blog, we shed light on a specific aspect of cloud traffic that often acts as a silent catalyst of cloud bill shock. Join us as we delve into this topic to better understand its implications.

The Transition to the Cloud

As stated initially, enterprises and organizations worldwide are adopting cloud computing since it offers a number of benefits that can help them improve their businesses:

• Cost savings: For example, cloud providers offer pay-as-you-go pricing, which means that enterprises only pay for the resources they use. This can lead to significant savings over traditional on-premises IT infrastructure.
• Agility: Cloud computing can help enterprises be more agile and responsive to change. This is because cloud resources can be provisioned and de-provisioned quickly and easily. This allows enterprises to scale their IT resources up or down quickly, as needed.
• Security: Cloud providers offer a number of security features that can help enterprises protect their data. These features include data encryption, access control, and disaster recovery.
• Compliance: Cloud providers can help enterprises comply with various regulations, such as HIPAA and PCI DSS. This is because cloud providers have a strong security and compliance track record.
• Innovation: Cloud computing can help enterprises innovate more quickly. This is because cloud providers offer a wide range of services that can be used to build and deploy new applications and services.

Now let’s see what types of traffic we have in Cloud Computing

In cloud computing, there are two types of traffic: ingress and egress.

• Ingress traffic is data transferred into a cloud computing environment. This can include traffic from the internet, other cloud regions, or other cloud services.
• Egress traffic is the data transferred from a cloud computing environment. This can include traffic to the internet, to other cloud regions, or other cloud services.

While ingress traffic costs are usually included in the monthly fee most cloud providers charge, the egress traffic costs are not included and require extra costs, which are usually unknown and unexpected. These costs can easily become the silent catalyst of cloud bill shock.

And what are these cloud egress fees?

Cloud egress fees refer to the charges cloud service providers impose when data is transferred from their cloud infrastructure to external networks or destinations. Egress refers to data flowing out of the cloud environment, such as when users download files, retrieve information, or transfer data to another location outside the cloud provider’s network.

Cloud providers often offer attractive pricing structures for inbound data transfers or data transfers within their own network (often referred to as “intra-region” or “intra-cloud” traffic).

Here are some examples of cloud egress traffic 

• Data Downloads: When users or applications retrieve files, documents, or media from cloud storage services, such as downloading a large video file from a cloud-based media library, egress fees may apply.
• Content Delivery: Content delivery networks (CDNs) distribute data from cloud servers to end-users around the world. When content is served from the CDN’s edge servers to users requesting it, egress fees may be incurred.
• Database Replication: In scenarios where databases are replicated across multiple regions or data centers for redundancy or scalability, data synchronization between these locations can generate egress traffic, resulting in egress fees.
• Cross-Cloud Data Transfers: If you need to move data between different cloud providers or migrate your data from one cloud provider to another, the transfer of data from one cloud environment to another may be subject to egress fees.
• Interacting with External Services: Cloud-based applications often need to interact with external services or APIs outside the cloud provider’s network. Data sent from the cloud environment to these external services can trigger egress fees.
• API Gateway: Exposed APIs using AWS API Gateway and clients make requests to those APIs; the response data sent back from API Gateway to the clients will create egress fees.

Egress fees are less expected and clear. Several factors can affect them. They can vary depending on factors such as the amount of data transferred, the destination of the data, the time and frequency in which data is transferred, and the geographic regions involved.

What measures should you take to uncover your cloud egress costs?

Well, if you ask ‘Chat GPT’ or ‘Bard’, they will tell you that you need to optimize your egress traffic by understanding the volumes that are transferred, their destinations, time, and frequency. They also recommend identifying all redundant egress traffic and avoiding transferring it.

If that were so easy, we probably wouldn’t be here speaking about the need to uncover egress traffic. It appears that this is a challenging task!

And for that, you need to have tools in place that will provide you with the required visibility and observability. Visibility of cloud data transfer involves real-time monitoring and capturing key metrics related to data movement within the cloud. The observability of cloud data transfer goes beyond visibility. It focuses on gaining deeper insights into the behavior, dependencies, granular usage of applications, services, and interactions of data during the transfer, including analysis of logs, traces, and metrics.

Allot Cloud Traffic Intelligence (ACTI) helps minimize your cloud expenses associated with egress traffic. It offers comprehensive observability into your cloud and hybrid cloud deployments, including assets, workloads, and applications. By leveraging contextual awareness of applications, services, APIs, and machine-to-machine communications, ACTI provides insights into related egress traffic costs. With ACTI, you can clearly understand your data transfer expenses.

Optimize cloud data transfer now for a hybrid or multi-cloud environment!