• AWS has announced that it will no longer charge customers when they chose to transfer data out of the hyperscaler’s ecosystem.
• The move follows a similar one made by Google earlier this year.
• The decisions by both firms come as a result of the European Data Act which seeks to foster greater competition within the cloud computing market.

Amazon Web Services has announced that it will no longer charge its customers when they choose to transfer data out of the AWS ecosystem, with all egress fees seemingly falling away.

“Starting today, we’re waiving data transfer out to the internet (DTO) charges when you want to move outside of AWS,” it noted in a blog post.

The move from the hyperscaler comes a couple of months after Google announced a similar change to its ecosystem policy, which currently leaves Microsoft as the only one still do so for Azure. Said change could be happening soon though, as both Google and AWS dropped egress fees on the back of the European Union’s Data Act come into play at the beginning of year.

The Data Act seeks to create a more competitive environment within the cloud service provider landscape, especially as the egress fees that customers often have to pay being one of the ways that hyperscalers limit the choices available to said customers and what they choose to do with their data.

While AWS has announced the change in policy, it was also careful to stress that its customers often incur few fees when transferring.

“Over 90 percent of our customers already incur no data transfer expenses out of AWS because we provide 100 gigabytes per month free from AWS Regions to the internet,” it highlighted. Should you wish to move more than the aforementioned 100GB, a request can be put into AWS Support by customers in need of assistance.

“We will review requests at the AWS account level. Once approved, we will provide credits for the data being migrated. We don’t require you to close your account or change your relationship with AWS in any way,” it explained.

“We believe in customer choice, including the choice to move your data out of AWS,” the hyperscaler concluded.