With IT organizations continuing their march to the cloud, CTOs are discovering that there are unexpected costs that can throw their IT budgets completely out-of-whack. One of the big ones is "Data Egress." But if you do your research and plan ahead, you can avoid or mitigate the most painful charges.
First Of All, Why The Cloud?
Even though we're past the hype phase around the cloud, we've learned just how valuable it can be, in many different ways.
There are no expensive hardware or software purchases up front, which can otherwise be a significant barrier to entry when you're starting up on or operating with a lean budget. There's also some level of infrastructure redundancy baked into the offering in the event of hardware failure, reducing one of the major headaches of server management.
You're able to provision resources quickly, scaling up or down as needed. One positive mention online can mean a flood of traffic to your web site or app, necessitating a rapid response to add resources that can accomodate all of those visitors without crashing your systems.
Most cloud services offer point-and-click management and monitoring of your virtual infrastructure, including some way to automate much of it, saving you countless hours for more important tasks.
What is Data Egress?
Simply put, any data leaving a network (controlled by the cloud provider) and being sent to an external location (the Internet at large) is "egress." The opposite, "ingress," is data coming into a network from an external location.
Egress traffic includes web site content being served to visitors, app data returned through API calls, blob and file share transfers, VPN tunnel data, etc.
Different Providers Have Different Egress Policies
Make sure to read the fine print when deploying to a particular cloud provider, because different providers have different charging methodologies for data egress.
CloudFlare provides free data egress for most of their services. But some of their services are more expensive than other cloud providers, so you end up saving if the data you're delivering is static content-heavy, like audio or video.
Digital Ocean includes a certain amount of data egress with each of their "Droplets" (VMs) free-of-charge, and you're charged for any additional that you use. The larger Droplets include more egress data since they'll probably have more of a load placed on them. The data egress amounts for all Droplets are aggregated and shared.
Azure includes a small amount (100GB / month) of data egress for free, but anything over that is charged, and it can add up very quickly if you're not careful.
Reduce/Avoid Egress Charges
Here are six useful ways to avoid or reduce your egress charges:
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Offload as many of your static assets to a CDN (Content Delivery Network). These offer free or cheap egress for files that don't change very often, and often include some type of geographic region caching to speed up content delivery in different locations.
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If you're using a Reverse Proxy, such as CloudFlare, you can utilize their Edge Caching feature. Their reverse proxy servers will cache your content, and serve that cached content to your visitors, to reduce the data egress required to serve your content.
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Use as much of the cloud-provider's private network as possible versus sending data over the public Internet. You should especially pay attention to this if you're sending data from one cloud resource to another cloud resource, where both are from the same cloud provider.
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Provision your resources in geographic regions with cheaper egress rates (if available). If the cloud provider's capacity is being under-utilized in a particular area, they may be charging lower rates to provision your resources there. You need to watch out for additional latency being introduced if the region is farther away from your users.
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Shop around for cloud providers with cheaper egress rates. There are hundreds of smaller cloud providers vying for your business and would be perfectly acceptable replacements for the big boys.
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You can also bring some of your cloud-hosted resources back to your on-premises network. Not everything needs to be hosted in the cloud for you to still receive many benefits of cloud hosting.
Plan Ahead
The key takeaway is that, like everything else, you need to do your research and plan ahead when choosing a cloud provider so that you don't get hit with unexpected charges.