Microsoft Finally Kills Azure Egress Fees

Bowing to pressure from AWS and Google, Microsoft announced that it would finally eliminate Azure egress fees, just like its competitors. This ends a contentious fight in which Microsoft had been accused of making it prohibitively expensive for customers to change clouds.

“We support customer choice, including the choice to migrate your data away from Azure,” a new post to the Azure updates website explains. “Azure now offers free egress for customers leaving Azure when taking their data out of the Azure infrastructure via the internet to switch to another cloud provider or an on-premises data center.”

In the wake of the EU European Data Act (EDA), Google eliminated egress fees from Google Cloud back in January, and Amazon AWS joined the party earlier this month. Microsoft, to date, had been silent on this issue, though it announced at the time of the EDA that it would let customers in Europe keep all of their personal data within the European Union. Google, in particular, has been quite vocal in its complaints about Microsoft’s cloud licensing restrictions in Europe, and it’s been calling out the software giant for not ending egress fees since it did so.

Well, now it has.

“The exemption on data transfer out to the internet fees aligns with the European Data Act and is accessible to all Azure customers globally and from any Azure region,” Microsoft notes. “Contact Azure Support for details on how to start the data transfer-out process.”