Amazon Web Services Reduces Data Output Costs After Oracle Critics

[ad_1]

Amazon Web Services has just announced a reduction in data transfer charges for customers. The cloud giant was recently attacked by Oracle and Cloudflare for its “artificially high” charges. But some analysts are skeptical, calling the cut “good publicity” with little real impact.

On Wednesday, cloud giant Amazon Web Services made a small but important change to its pricing structure.

Specifically, it has eliminated the fees to move up to 100 gigabytes of data out of its cloud each month, which goes up to one free terabyte of data per month to pull data from its CloudFront product. The change will take effect on December 1, affecting what AWS says in a blog post will be “millions” of customers around the world.

This means that AWS customers, except those who use its government cloud and in China, will not have to pay to move their data out of Amazon’s cloud platform until they reach these limits. An AWS spokesperson told Insider the move was part of a “long tradition” of lowering prices. The change comes as AWS prepares for its annual re: Invent conference, to be held next week in Las Vegas.

The price change comes after months of bashing from competitors of AWS Oracle and Cloudflare’s $ 63.5 billion: The two companies had separately targeted these data transfer charges – often referred to as exit charges in the industry. ‘industry – arguing that the amount Amazon charged customers for these charges was “unfriendly” and “artificially high”. The two companies have also recently teamed up to reduce data transfer charges for their mutual customers.

Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, tweeted Wednesday that Amazon’s announcement was “great news for our mutual customers” and “the next step towards the inevitable end of the cloud exit.” Oracle did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.

Now it looks like AWS has taken notice, or at least is responding to pressure from competitors and customers, said Larry Carvalho, analyst at RobustCloud. “Customers say, ‘Hey, why are we paying so much? Everyone charges less, ”he said.

Gartner analyst Adam Ronthal agreed that the pressure had “increased” on the big three cloud providers to change their data egress tariffs, but has not yet reached a tipping point where they are. will eliminate completely.

Indeed, customers have long been frustrated with the disconnect between paying nothing to download data to cloud platforms, combined with the shock of how much it costs to retrieve it. They have also increasingly pushed back the pricing models of cloud giants, demanding more price transparency as their cloud bills rise.

Analysts also said Amazon’s data transfer change was good news for startups and developers testing their apps, but wouldn’t make a significant difference for larger customers who have needs that are likely far beyond the limits of his free plan.

And compared to what competitors like Oracle Cloud are offering for free data transfer, which is ten terabytes, Ronthal said the real impact of changing AWS is smaller than it looks and s’ more akin to “a good publicity stunt”.

“Amazon can go out and say, ‘Look, we’ve done a hundred times the expansion to exit the region,” he said. “But you look at the actual numbers involved, they’ve gone from a gigabyte to a hundred gigabytes, and it’s pretty small.”

Still, Ronthal noted that this was not the first time that AWS had lowered prices, calling Wednesday’s change a “small step, but it is certainly a step in the right direction.”

“People who feel good about cutting costs, millions of customers will feel good,” Carvalho said.

[ad_2]