Amazon Cancels Fees for Customers Moving To Rival Cloud Services

Amazon's cloud services division is halting fees it has long charged customers that switch to a rival provider -- following in the steps of Google, which recently announced it was ending the practice. From a report: Amazon Web Services will no longer charge customers who want to extract all of their data from the company's servers and move them to another service, AWS Vice President Robert Kennedy said in a blog post on Tuesday. "Beginning today, customers globally are now entitled to free data transfers out to the internet if they want to move to another IT provider," Kennedy said.

Nice.

[Petersko]

Good for them. I'm sure the devil's in the details, but on the surface it looks like a positive step. Might not be much more commendable than, "Hey, I stopped beating my wife!"... but at least they stopped.

Re:

[timeOday]

Nor do I really care if they were motivated by the threat of anti-trust regulation or legislation. (Although if so, kudos to the regulators).

Re:Nice.

[PCM2]

As often seems to be the case, it's EU legislation that's pushing them. The upcoming Data Act has some kind of language that requires cloud providers to make it easier for customers to switch services.

Re:

[zshXx]

Lets all pray that EU remain relevant enough in bigger picture. That's the only area of the world with some common sense. Asian/African leadership want to control/sensor everything and American capitalism want to hog and sell everyone's data and create walled gardens.

Re:

[zshXx]

s/sensor/censor

everyone knows why

[MooseTick]

Most people have wised up and determined that moving to the cloud can be a one way street unless you are ready to potentially spend millions of $$ to get your data back when you decide to move to a "new" solution. And anyone who has been in corporate IT for 10+ years can attest that they like to retool periodically and the inability to move data to the new tool can be a non-starter. Vendors love lock-in, but most corporations won't pick a solution they can't back out of after learning that the hard way a ti

Re:everyone knows why

[youngone]

The vast American corporation I just finished working for has moved all their data onto Microsoft's onedrive.
When the project started it was going to save a lot of money, but they've had three rounds of price increases and it no longer is.
They'll start moving it all back in a couple of years time I would imagine.

Re:

[coofercat]

This raises some interesting questions though... Lets say I have a 1PB of data in AWS today. I've decided that Google plays golf better than Bezos, so I'm going to move to GCP. My minions have built a bit of the environment in GCP, and we're ready to start filling it with data.

How does anyone proceed *and* get the close-your-account-benefits? You're not going to say to AWS "close my account" on a Friday, shut everything down and then just pop up on GCP on the Monday - you'll need weeks, or more likely month