Google Cloud ends migration costs for switching to competitors

Google makes it free for enterprise cloud users to migrate their environments to other cloud providers. The company will stop egress fees for data in the storage and data management packages. This is only possible for complete packages.

Google Cloud say that it will stop the egress fees, the migration costs it charges for removing data to move it to another provider. That is not unconditional; the policy only applies to data within “data storage and data management products,” the company wrote in an attached support document. These are BigQuery, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Datastore, Filestore, Spanner and Persistent Disk.

In addition, users must submit a request to Google for this. This is only possible if they actually cancel within sixty days of the application. Customers can therefore only migrate their entire data and not just part of it.

Google’s egress fees were low between $0.12 and $0.08 per gigibyte. Google says it’s doing away with fees because the company wants to “make it easier for customers to migrate,” but also because it wants to enable more interoperability between cloud providers. The company hopes that if customers can switch between cloud providers more easily, customers will also come back to Google Cloud more easily. Google mainly benefits from this. The company wants to compete with AWS and Azure, but is still far behind those players. However, the department has made a profit for the first time since last year.

Correction: initially the fees were stated in this article as terabytes, but that must be as of gibibyte are. The piece also initially stated that this applies ‘to paying users with a Premium Tier Network Service Tier package’, but that is incorrect. Premium Tier is a connection.