Earlier today, Amazon AWS announced a reduction in egress charges. The new charges:

· $0.100 per GB – data transfer in

· $0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out

· $0.130 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out

· $0.110 per GB – next 100 TB / month data transfer out

· $0.100 per GB – data transfer out / month over 150 TB

Compared with the old:

· $0.100 per GB – data transfer in

· $0.180 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out

· $0.160 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out

· $0.130 per GB – data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Most networking contracts charge symmetrically for ingress and egress – you pay the max of the two — so the ingress cost to Amazon is effectively zero.

Note that it’s a non-linear reduction favoring higher volume users. TechCrunch reported a couple of days back that the Amazon AWS customer base has rapidly swung from a nearly pure start-up community to more of a mix of startups and very large enterprises with the enterprise customers now bringing the largest workloads (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/21/who-are-the-biggest-users-of-amazon-web-services-its-not-startups/). Not really all that surprising – I expected this to happen and talked about it in the Next Big Thing. What is surprising to me is the speed with which the transformation is taking place. I was predicting workload mix shift to happen at AWS 3 to 5 years from now. Things are moving quickly in the services world.

–jrh

James Hamilton, Windows Live Platform Services
Bldg RedW-D/2072, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, 98052
W:+1(425)703-9972 | C:+1(206)910-4692 | H:+1(206)201-1859 | JamesRH@microsoft.com

H:mvdirona.com | W:research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh | blog:http://perspectives.mvdirona.com