Estimating Migration Costs

sending large amounts of data between clouds might be expensive and the total cost of your migration might be more than you pay to flexify io this article gives an overview of what you may expect to pay when migrating your data introduction your total migration cost will consist of several categories flexify io fees this is what we charge per gigabyte of migrated data cloud egress traffic fees most, if not all, cloud providers would charge you directly for each gigabyte of data leaving their cloud cloud data retrieval fees cloud providers may also charge for retrieving data from cold or archival storage classes cloud early deletion fees some cloud providers require that you store data for at least a certain period of time and charge extra if you delete an object sooner cloud request fees some cloud providers charge per request when listing, reading, or writing objects how flexify io migrates data flexify io uses engines to migrate data an engine reads data from one storage and copies or moves it to another storage, possibly, in a different cloud engines usually run on virtual machines and may wait in strategically selected cloud regions, or be deployed automatically for the duration of a migration the location of engines defines the rates that we pay to cloud providers (and reflect in our rates), as well as egress traffic fees that your cloud provider may charge you flexify io fees flexify io rates are published at https //flexify io#pricing and start from $0 02/gib for selected cloud providers those rates depend on a migration source cloud and region, destination, and path, and may change when advanced migration settings are modified some rates are more expensive than others because they reduce or eliminate your egress fees (see below on that), achieve faster migration, or sometimes are just more costly for us without any tangible benefits that's why it is important to carefully consider the consequences of selecting a non default engines location flexify io interface helps you estimating flexify io rates and fees when you configure a migration always check that the rate is what you're expecting for your particular migration settings, especially when selecting a non default cloud or region for engines in the advanced migration settings cloud fees your migration may result in some additional fees that your cloud provider, not flexify io, would charge egress traffic fees ingress traffic is usually free, but in most cases (wasabi being a notable exception), your cloud provider will charge egress traffic fees for data leaving the cloud those charged vary by provider amazon web services https //aws amazon com/s3/pricing/ google cloud platform https //cloud google com/vpc/network pricing https //cloud google com/storage/pricing#network egress microsoft azure https //azure microsoft com/en us/pricing/details/bandwidth/ for the tier 1 providers (aws, azure, gcp), those rates can be $80 100 per tb and even higher, constituting the biggest portion of the migration cost and at times making the entire migration cost prohibitive this is their way to ensure lock in however, there are no such egress fees for you when we read data using engines in the same cloud and region as your data is stored for example, to migrate from amazon s3 us west 2 to backblaze b2, flexify io would automatically deploy engines to aws ec2 us west 2 this would eliminate the need for you to pay egress fees to aws data retrieval fees some cloud providers allow storing data at very cheap per gb rates, but charge a fee when the data is accessed examples are amazon s3 infrequent access, glacier archive, and glacier deep archive storage classes https //aws amazon com/s3/pricing/ gcp nearline, coldline, and archive storage https //cloud google com/storage/pricing#archival pricing azure cool and archive storage classes https //azure microsoft com/en us/pricing/details/storage/blobs/ aws also offers s3 intelligent tiering that automatically decides a storage class for an object aws data retrieval fees also depend on a retrieval tier (bulk, standard, expedited), and may require objects to be restored with a custom script prior to migrating them in most cases when you use the default standard storage class, there are no data retrieval fees early deletion fees some cloud providers, notably wasabi, as well as certain storage classes or tiers, require that your data is stored for at least a certain amount of time, usually from 3 to 6 months if your data is younger than that, you may need to consider the early deleting fees when planning a migration request fees most cloud providers also charge for requests such as listing, reading, or writing objects, depending on a storage class or tier usually, those fees are neglectable, just a few cents or dollars, but might be an important factor if you are migrating a large number (billions) of relatively small (<1 mb) objects from a cheap cold/archival storage example migrating 100 tib (100 million objects) from amazon s3 us west 2 (standard class) to azure westus (hot) using our self service offer and engines in digitalocean would cost flexify io fee 102,400 gib $0 02/gib = $2,048 00 aws egress traffic fee first 10 tb 10,240 gib $0 09/gib = $921 60 next 40 tb 40,960 gib $0 085 = $3,481 60 next 100 tb 51,200 gib $0 07/gib = $3,584 00 total for egress traffic $7,987 20 aws data retrieval fee $0 00 aws early deletion fee $0 00 aws requests fee 1,000,000 list requests $0 005 / 1,000 reqeusts = $5 00 100,000,000 get requests $0 0004 / 1,000 reqeusts = $40 00 total for aws requests $45 00 azure requests fee 100,000,000 head requests $0 0044 / 10,000 requests = $44 00 100,000,000 put requests $0 055 / 10,000 requests = $550 00 total for azure requests $594 00 total self service migration cost $10,674 20 however, if you perform the same migration using flexify's managed service offer, you can avoid aws egress fees and reduce the migration cost flexify io fee 102,400 gib $0 04/gib = $4,096 00 aws egress traffic fee $0 00 (taken by flexify io) aws data retrieval fee $0 00 aws early deletion fee $0 00 aws requests fee $45 00 azure requests fee $594 00 total manager service migration cost $4,735 00 you can cut the total migration cost by more than a half when choosing flexify io rates that eliminate cloud provider's egress fees