AWS has scrapped its data fees for customers who want to jump ship to a rival cloud service.
The EU’s Data Act forced the company to make the U-turn, which came into force in January and bans cloud providers from ripping off customers who want to switch.
Amazon’s announcement barely mentions the EU law, only saying that its move “follows the direction set by the European Data Act.”
Most AWS customers – the company says “over 90 per cent” – already get a free ride to move data to a competitor, as they get 100GB of free egress per month, and 1TB out of Amazon CloudFront.
But that’s peanuts for most cloud migrations. Now, customers can move as much data as they want – as long as they tell AWS first.
AWS says customers must contact its support team for free data transfer to the internet (DTO) rates. This is because “we generally do not know if the data transferred out to the internet is a normal part of your business or a one-time transfer as part of a switch to another cloud provider or on-premises.”
AWS has listed all the steps needed to complete a migration. Once they get the green light, customers will have 60 days to finish their data transfer, and they can come back “at any time.” That’s a big difference from Google, which axed its data fees earlier this year and forced customers to close their accounts for good when they leave.
However, AWS will monitor any account that asks for free DTO rates more than once.
With AWS and Google offering free data fees, the only one of the big three left out is Microsoft, the world’s second-largest cloud provider. Its rivals have previously slammed Vole over its “unfair practices”, urging regulators to crack down on what they see as a growing monopoly.
