As Google rightly points out, egress is not the main deterrent to data and infrastructure migration.
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Last month, Google made yet another cloudy promise to its customers - zero egress fee for those willing to ditch Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for good. Hyperscalars charge exorbitant egress charges, locking users into their ecosystem. However, Google, often criticized for monopolizing search and ad markets, presents an altruistic stance on cloud migration. Is it a marketing tactic or a sincere gesture? Let's not overlook the fine print — terms and conditions apply!
For starters, free egress applies solely to customers exiting GCP permanently, subject to Google's approval. Once approved customers only have 60 days to fully migrate, an insufficient timeframe for enterprises with substantial data volumes. The offer is also exclusive to premium-level service users and applies to data hosted under specific services. The contingencies continue. So much for Google’s magnanimous offer — true generosity is rare!
Google’s official blogpost itself seems to have a disproportionate focus on taking not-so-subtle jibes at its biggest rival, Microsoft. It doesn’t really highlight the (almost non-existent, as per Google itself) merits of their latest offer. Consider this excerpt from the GCP blog:
Certain legacy providers leverage their on-premises software monopolies to create cloud monopolies, using restrictive licensing practices that lock in customers and warp competition.
There’s little ambiguity left around who those certain legacy providers are. To Google’s credit, the points raised are valid, regardless of the motives or self-serving intent behind them. Huge network data transfer rates are just a small part of the bigger trap. There’s a lot more to the cloud migration expense and complexity. So, let’s break down why free egress, despite being a step in the right direction, is too little, too late.
As Google rightly points out, egress is not the main deterrent to data and infrastructure migration. Here’s everything else that adds up when switching cloud providers:
This one seems to be one of GCP’s major critiques and motivation behind the move. Providers with enterprise software dominance can establish cloud monopolies through stringent licensing practices, such as offering licensing discounts for in-house cloud offerings, imposing steep surcharges for competitor cloud usage, and restricting interoperability with competing infrastructure providers. Consequently, enterprises have to pay in terms of both cost and complexity to regain their freedom of choice when it comes switching providers or choosing a multi-cloud configuration that best suits their long-term needs.
Most companies start out with a single cloud but realize the suitability or benefits of other platforms later on. By that time, they are already too invested in their single cloud provider, relying exclusively on the provider’s native services and solutions. Switching providers becomes more complex than simply restructuring and transferring data to another cloud environment; it necessitates a complete overhaul of their infrastructure, applications, and processes. It can involve a significant organizational and cultural shift. As a result, organizations find themselves locked-in, unable to adapt to changing needs or explore alternative cloud solutions.
Not all compatibility issues are deliberate. There has been a lack of standardization in the cloud landscape. Different cloud providers use different protocols, data formats, APIs, standards, or architectures, making it hard to ensure compatibility between corresponding systems during migration. This adds to the expense and complexity of migration as customers may have to switch technologies, restructure data, rearchitect applications, and redefine processes to manage dependencies.
Despite meticulous planning and preparation, service or application downtime can still occur during cloud-to-cloud migrations, which can impact productivity and revenue. Companies implement contingency plans, communication strategies, and backup systems to maintain essential functions during downtime period, all which adds to the cost of migration.
Successful cloud-to-cloud migration requires expertise in both source and target cloud platforms, as well as migration tools and techniques. Acquiring new talent or training existing personnel for migration and adapting to the new cloud environment requires additional resources. Egress fee is just one aspect of migration costs. The true cost of migration lies in the technical details, organizational change, and adapting teams to the new environment. The emma cloud management platform helps foster a cloud-agnostic environment where cloud management and migration across any number of cloud providers is simple and cost-effective.
At its core, the emma cloud management platform presents the entire cloud landscape — all cloud types and providers — as a cohesive whole. It allows organizations to cherry pick services, solutions, and platforms on demand, without encountering compatibility, complexity, and cost issues. Here’s how emma’s intuitive and holistic cloud management platform enables that:
emma allows for a gradual transition and exit as needed, even if you're not ready for a multi-cloud. It integrates with all major cloud providers, enabling you to phase out your cloud exit by migrating cloud-agnostic workloads first or selecting the best-suited environment for newer projects while retaining mission-critical or hard-to-migrate projects in the original environment. A phased transition means minimal downtime, and the emma platform provides a single dashboard for managing both cloud environments in the meanwhile.
The emma platform fosters cloud-agnostic management practices through standardized management interfaces that abstract away the underlying inconsistencies within different clouds. CloudOps and other teams can configure resources, build and deploy applications and VMs, and create environments without coding or cloud-specific configurations. The emma platform’s intuitive interface lets you do all that with just a few clicks, no matter the cloud or region. This means, the skill set remains the same through every cloud exit or addition.
emma itself is cloud-agnostic, which means its functionality spans all cloud platforms. Cloud provisioning, deployment, and management remains constant across all clouds, eliminating the organizational and cultural shift and disruptions typically associated with intercloud migration or multi-cloud adoption.
Licensing issues are difficult to overcome unless there are market regulations that compel fair competition and penalize monopolistic practices like restrictive licensing policies. emma offers built-in integrations with various end-to-end security, networking, storage, and automation platforms that seamlessly operate across different cloud providers and infrastructure types. With its cloud-agnostic nature and dedication to promoting vendor-independent platforms and tooling, the emma platform is shaping a future where organizations can freely select or switch their providers based on their needs and preferences.
Even if you’re content with your cloud provider today, your opinion might change in the future. AWS just announced the retirement of Aurora Serverless v1, and the newer version does not scale down to zero, which is a major characteristic of the serverless paradigm. It means even in idle state there will be constant charging and provisioning. The services and solutions that keep you true to your CSP can be phased out, priced higher, or even outpaced by another cloud. For instance, last year, Microsoft Azure outpaced AWS and GCP in growth acceleration due to its market leading AI initiatives. It will be a while before GCP and especially AWS can catch up to that. The choice to either switch or add another provider to the mix is absolutely crucial for today’s pace of innovation and the era of rising cloud prices as CSPs try to maximize ROIs.
With major regulations underway to boost healthy competition in the cloud market, other cloud providers will likely follow GCP’s suite to cut egress costs and facilitate migration on customers’ demand. However, slashing costs and overcoming other migration barriers will be futile if enterprises fail to establish a solid foundation in their cloud initiatives through cloud-agnostic tools and strategies.
Make sure you set your foot right when entering the cloud’s increasingly murky waters. Download our “Design Principles for Multi-cloud Interoperability” whitepaper to stay ahead of cloud migration challenges for when the time inevitably comes!