back to article Microsoft decides it's done with Azure egress ransoms

Microsoft on Wednesday said it will no longer charge customers an egress fee to remove their data from its Azure cloud, following similar declarations earlier this year from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google. "We support customer choice, including the choice to migrate your data away from Azure," the company said in a blog …

  1. sedregj Bronze badge
    Childcatcher

    Wankery

    "We support customer choice" - no you really don't - why bother lying?

    MS is a for profit corp with multiple stock exchange listings. They have to attempt to transfer as much money from customers and pop it into the pockets of investors as is possible.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Wankery

      Also they seem to have left a catch in. Most people won't remove everything in one go so they can close their account and get their 'credit'. They're far more likely to have a migration project and move things back on premise a bit at a time.... meaning they still end up paying and it's still a lock in.

    2. Doogie Howser MD

      Re: Wankery

      Whilst I agree with your comment on them not really supporting customer choice (I mean, none of them do), in the interests of balance it's worth pointing out that dividends from stocks also play a large part in pension funds, so not just flash Wall St types but also butchers, bakers and candle stick makers. It's just the way the money circle works.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Wankery

        "in the interests of balance it's worth pointing out that dividends from stocks also play a large part in pension funds"

        Pension funds which overwhelmingly avoid tech stocks due to their high degree of fluctuation, and focus more on traditional industries with stable returns like oil and gas, and most of all real estate (Pension funds love real estate).

    3. Snake Silver badge

      Re: Wankery

      As an American I get to make this point:

      "American society is [now] a for-profit corp with multiple stock exchange listings. They have to attempt to transfer as much money from customers and pop it into the pockets of investors as is possible."

      FIFY

      1. sedregj Bronze badge
        Childcatcher

        Re: Wankery

        To be fair, it isn't just American society.

    4. Alan Bourke

      Re: Wankery

      They do.

      At gunpoint.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Heh heh heh

    Once data egress is taken out of the mix, the only thing left for OFCOM to look at is coercive licensing practices.

    That is not going to end well for one cloud provider.

    Chuckle.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Egress smeegress

    Corey Quinn is spot on - if you are moving from one cloud provider to another, the egress fees are less than small change compared to all the other costs so removing them makes zero difference to any decision to move providers (i.e. it has no impact on competition). The egress fees during normal operation ARE what affects competition and this is where the regulatory authorities should be focusing, and on (certain unnamed cloud provider) licensing practices that are so clearly anti-competitive that even my cat sees it!

    1. Peter-Waterman1

      Re: Egress smeegress

      I’m sure Netflix would love a no egress fee model but not sure it makes good business sense for AWS

    2. Zippy´s Sausage Factory

      Re: Egress smeegress

      Your cat must have good eyesight. All my cat sees is bacon, which she naturally assumes should belong to her and be deposited in her tummy without further notice.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Egress smeegress

        He does have great eyesight... can spot mice, ham, scraps of food on the floor, and anti-competitive licensing at 100 yards :-)

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Q. How would MS know the difference between an "egress" and running a bunch of queries on your datatables that happen to involve exfiltrating all the contents to somewhere else?

    2nd Q. Why on earth did you go cloud or Azure in the first place? And did the CIO that implemented it leave already (probably), leaving the staff to pick up the pieces?

    1. doublelayer Silver badge

      "Q. How would MS know the difference between an "egress" and running a bunch of queries on your datatables that happen to involve exfiltrating all the contents to somewhere else?"

      They wouldn't, which is why both are billed and why you have to shut down your account or meet some other requirements to qualify for that bill to be canceled.

      "2nd Q. Why on earth did you go cloud or Azure in the first place?"

      Well in the case of some of my employers, because they're relatively small, so they don't need enough servers to set up their own server room, and renting them across continents instead of collocating them was considered either cheaper or more reliable (I write code that runs on the servers, not choosing where to put them). I think they could have done better by running the compute-intensive internal stuff somewhere local, but running the public-facing stuff on cloud servers makes sense the way they've arranged it.

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