AWS data transfer charges: how to minimize network traffic costs between regions and availability zones

January 12, 2023

First off, let’s start with defining AWS data transfer. It refers to the movement of data in and out of AWS services over the internet or other networks, or between different AWS services, such as moving data from an Amazon S3 bucket to an Amazon EC2 instance. In other words, it includes various scenarios, like transferring data from on-premises or other cloud platforms to AWS services or vice versa. AWS data transfer also occurs when transferring data between different AWS services, whether it’s happening between different Availability Zones or within the same AZ. Just a refresher: Availability Zones are physically separate, isolated data centers within certain AWS regions; they are engineered to be isolated from failures in other Availability Zones.

How much does the AWS data transfer cost?

Why is it such a big deal to know the ins and outs of AWS data transfer regarding AWS cloud cost management? It’s important because data transfer costs can add up, quickly representing a significant portion of a company’s overall AWS bill if overlooked and not paid enough attention to. And only by getting an idea of how exactly data is transferred between your clouds, different availability zones, and/or AWS services you’re using you can make more informed decisions about optimizing your data transfer usage and ultimately reduce your overall cloud costs.

Let’s start with a caveat: there’s a common misconception that all data transfer within an AWS availability zone is free of charge, but no, it’s not. When a VPC peering connection is involved, charges from AWS are still incurred.

Generally speaking, the cost of AWS data transfer varies depending on the parameters and aspects we discussed above: the amount of data being transferred (there is a non-linear data-price dependence), specific AWS services involved, and the distance the data is moving. However, as a rule of thumb, data transfer within an AWS region is less expensive than transferring data across regions. In addition, data transfer between different AWS services within the same availability zone is typically cheaper than moving data between availability zones.

Here are some of the most common examples of AWS data transfer costs:

Data transfer between two Amazon EC2 instances in the same availability zone is free (if there’s no VPC peering connection).
Data transfer between two Amazon EC2 instances in different availability zones within the same region is charged at $0.01 per GB.
Data transfer between an Amazon EC2 instance and an Amazon S3 bucket in the same region costs $0.09 per GB.
Data transfer between an Amazon EC2 instance and an on-premises system over an AWS Direct Connect connection costs $0.01 per GB.
Data transfer between an Amazon EC2 instance and another cloud provider (such as Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform) is charged at $0.02 per GB.
Data transfer between an Amazon S3 bucket in the US East (N. Virginia) region and an Amazon S3 bucket in the EU (Ireland) region is charged at $0.01 per GB.
Data transfer between an Amazon EC2 instance in the US East (N. Virginia) region and an Amazon S3 bucket in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region is charged at $0.19 per GB.

These examples of costs are given for your consideration so that you have a general idea of how much you will pay based on usage patterns of your cloud data transfer. Of course, the exact cost will depend on the specific AWS services and scenarios involved.

How to minimize network traffic costs between regions and availability zones

There are a few ways you can minimize network traffic costs between regions and availability zones in AWS:

1. Use Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) optimized instances, which are EC2 instances optimized for EBS I/O, to improve the performance of your network traffic and, as a result, reduce the amount of data transferred over the network. Also, EBS-optimized instances can help your workloads run more efficiently, reducing the time your workloads spend transferring data over the web. Finally, dedicated, high-throughput, low-latency network connections ensured by EBS-optimized instances help reduce the time your workloads spend reading and writing data to and from an instance.

2. Use Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration, which uses the Amazon CloudFront global edge network to accelerate data transfer to and from Amazon S3. The CloudFront edge network works in a way that reduces the distance that data needs to travel and the number of “hops” it needs to make between your users and your S3 bucket. As a result, the time data spends in transit will also decrease. Besides, S3 Transfer Acceleration caches frequently accessed data at edge locations closer to your users, reducing the amount of data that needs to be transferred over the network.

3. Use Amazon Direct Connect, a dedicated network connection between your on-premises environment and AWS, to reduce data transfer costs and improve performance. Being a reliable network connection, Direct Connect minimizes the time data spends in transit between your on-premises environment and AWS. At the same time, it helps reduce congestion on the public internet.

4. Use AWS data transfer pricing discounts. AWS offers several types of volume-based discounts that reduce the fees you pay based on the amount of data you transfer. For example, a volume-based discount of 50% for the first 10 TB of data transmitted monthly between AWS services in different regions.

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Will this be enough? Aren’t there any hidden network transfer costs?

Remember that when it comes to the cloud, there always will be hidden costs, and those related to data transfer are no exception. Such hidden costs can include the time and effort required to manage and optimize your network traffic, the impact of network bottlenecks on the performance of your workloads, and lost or corrupted data due to network errors or failures.

Hidden data transfer costs are difficult to identify and measure, making them challenging to manage and minimize. However, if you follow the above advice, you’ll be able to substantially reduce hidden data transfer costs by tackling the root cause.

If you opt for third-party tools like OptScale, you can minimize hidden data transfer costs even more by getting access to additional functionality not available with native AWS services.

For example, OptScale provides a geo and network traffic cost map, which shows accumulated expenses for paid network traffic between cloud regions and external services. This will ensure no hidden costs are associated with it, including lost IT team momentum and productivity, revenue, and customer satisfaction.

Hystax OptScale offers the first-ever open source FinOps & multi-cloud cost management solution that is fully available under Apache 2.0 on GitHub → https://github.com/hystax/optscale

👆🏻 Find best practices + helpful tips to reduce your AWS bill → How to identify and delete orphaned and unused snapshots.

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