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.
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.
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 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.
Your migration may result in some additional fees that your cloud provider, not Flexify.IO, would charge.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.