AWS Inter AZ Data Transfer Cost

This article provides a general overview about Data Transfer Costs associated with Inter AZ Traffic within AWS services, also highlights few of the use-cases in general.

Before you start
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This goes without saying, Data Transfer costs between regions are typically high when you compare the same with data transfer between 2 different availability zones. Similarly, data that’s being transferred within the same availability zone shall incur the least charge all all.
The data that gets transferred between different AZs is  massive in comparison with the data being transferred within same (or) chosen AZ.

  • You are supposed to pay for outbound transfers, while data transfers coming to EC2 is free of charge. A lot of the new AWS customers sometimes misunderstood, they automatically fall into what is called an unawareness trap.
  • Mainly, data being transferred out from EC2 instance to the internet will do incur charges which may quickly grow & add up to the monthly billing.
  • In case of having a couple of not configured re-hosted applications that are not even aligned with AWS Services, they are more likely going to incur costs for data transfers. They need to get re-architected to ensure, that the data being transferred will chose the least costing route ever.
  • Organizations & companies leverage positive effects of Hybrid Cloud by off-loading few apps to AWS Cloud and few remain in their data centers (on-premise). Communication occurring between the cloud and on-premises data centers may be capable of inflecting great spikes in terms of transfer costs that will show up in monthly bills.

Reducing the pricing for Data Transfer:
AWS Inter AZ Data Transfer Cost - reduce pricing

AWS Inter AZ Data Transfer Cost – reduce pricing

Data transfer pricing depends on the AWS architecture leveraging native services. Also, other key factor can be the environment in which your apps/services are deployed that chooses data to flow in the cheaper routes.


Select Acceptable Regions:

Regardless of # of services you’re now subscribed to, the data transfer cost will be high when transferring data across regions. The most efficient way is limit to few regions where the data flows across.

  • Rearchitecting the dynamics of AWS cloud wrt. your use-cases, the data transfer costs occurring between different AZs within a single region will be cheaper in comparison to transfers between regions.
  • Similarly, rearchitecting to include data transfer with same AZ will reduce costs, that do comes at a trade-off of not having a well architected framework. You can find a way through rearchitecting in order to maintain your data transfer costs at minimum.

Detailed Table referred below to understand data transfer costs in Ec2 (40 TB flowing outside):
AWS RegionData Transfer Costs
South America (Sao Paulo)$0.23 per GB
US East (N. Virginia)$0.085 per GB
US East (Ohio)$0.085 per GB
US West (Oregon)$0.085 per GB
Asia Pacific (Mumbai)$0.085 per GB
Asia Pacific (Singapore)$0.085 per GB
EU (Frankfurt)$0.085 per GB
EU (London)$0.085 per GB
AWS GovCloud (US)$0.115 per GB
Asia Pacific (Seoul)$0.122 per GB
Asia Pacific (Sydney)$0.135 per GB
Asia Pacific (Tokyo)$0.135 per GB

Additional Savings:
 
AWS Inter AZ Data Transfer Cost - manage ip address

AWS Inter AZ Data Transfer Cost – manage ip address

  • The IP address you use will affect the data transfer costs & might cause an increase expenses.
  • Data transfer costs will become expensive when data is transferred through an Elastic-IP (or) public-IP, It advisable to choose Private-IP if possible.
  • If your services/apps support private IP address, not to public IP, quickly jump and take the chance to implement it, It greatly influences the costs wrt. saving.
  • Additionally, always compress & cache your data prior to getting it transferred, this reduces significant costs.

If choosing Private IP address, go ahead and enable the following:

  • Caching at your origin servers.
  • S3 for CloudFront edge locations to speed up delivery of data(APIs, video content, different web assets & websites).
  • Always suggested to enable compression of dynamic as well as static content at the same time.
  • Ensure that the server-side compression along with the client-side caching is automated upon the deployment in the release automation cycle.

Here are few awesome resources on AWS Costs:
AWS data transfer pricing between availability zones
AWS Cloud Cost Analysis
AWS Migration Cost Estimation


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