Have you ever used a Cloud Service Provider (CSP), convinced that it was a good idea, and you regretted it? Are you considering moving your application's data to another CSP like AWS?

Uploading everything to the Cloud is easy because the data that goes in (ingress) is free of charge...

But my friend, from the moment you have a certain amount of data in the Cloud and have to download it, it is when the stuff gets challenging...

All the egress traffic (downloaded data) is getting billed in most of the CSPs.

There is no doubt that moving 20 GB is an easy task, but when you have logs or information that is considerably big (for example, +100 TB), you should know what options you have.

AWS released the Snowball service some years ago for migrating vast amounts of data from on-prem to the AWS Cloud. Microsoft has its service (Azure Data Box), and Google too (Transfer Appliance)...

These devices have some in common, and you can not ship them to a CSP for migrating from Cloud A to Cloud B. This doesn´t work.

What options are left if we migrate from one CSP to another?

To use IPsec VPN through the internet: It will be recommended by 95% of the population; it is the way to go for these cases where we have to move data from one CSP to another.

Challenges with VPN

• Huge Egress traffic costs at a certain amount of data
• Limited throughput
• The traffic gets exposed to the internet

What if I tell you that there is another way to perform this task, saving up to three times the money in terms of data transfer?

To use a Cloud ROUTER:

Many connectivity partners have developed this solution to have a centralized routing hub for serving multi-cloud and hybrid-multi-cloud operations.

With this technology, you can save much money for migrating because the data transfer price is much lower for a private connection than via VPN. The best part is that you don´t need any equipment in the Data Center for a multi-cloud setup; everything has been set.

The Cloud ROUTER unifies the different Cloud private connectivity services (AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute, Google Interconnect...), and it interconnects them in a fast & easy way.

Depending on the setup, you can create high throughput connections from the CSPs and migrate the data in hours or minutes.

Let´s compare the standard egress traffic prices for AWS, Google, and Azure.

• Data Transfer Out using VPN

• Data Transfer Out using Direct Connect: Data located in Europe, leaving to a DX location in Europe -> $0.0200 per GB

• Data Transfer Out using VPN

• Data Transfer Out using Google Interconnect: Data leaving over an Interconnect connection in Europe -> $0.0200 per GiB

• Data Transfer Out using VPN

• Data Transfer Out using Express Route: Data from EU leaving over an Express Route connection in Europe -> $0.025 per GB

As you can see, going via VPN is much more expensive than going privately; let´s do a small exercise.

Exercise

We are a networking architect, and our CTO brings us the task of migrating from Azure towards AWS. We have 180 TB of data from our Azure Blob Storage, and we have to migrate them to AWS S3.
Our data is located in Europe.

Let´s do the calculation; we will use the Azure Pricing Calculator:

The first 100GB of traffic through the public internet are for free*

If we compare the amount, going with an Express Route connection, is 2.33 times cheaper than using the internet for the data transfer.

Let´s do the same exercise with Google:

The first 200GB of traffic through the public internet are for free*

It is 3.14 times cheaper to do the migration via a Google Interconnect than using the internet in terms of data transfer

And what about if we do the same exercise using AWS?:

The first 100GB of traffic through the public internet are for free*

It is 3.55 times cheaper to do the migration with Direct Connect than moving the data through the internet in terms of data transfer

Note:
These calculations do not include the related costs of the Express Route/Google Interconnect/Direct Connect and its related services like PrivateLink or the Cloud ROUTER...

The full solution, with the side costs is cheaper than using the public internet.

For more information on the prices, ask your connectivity partner for a quote.

Conclusion

With the usage of this type of new technology, doing a cloud migration gets simplified, in terms of efficiency, performance, and costs.

It is essential to know which options we have; being flexible is the key, especially in something so critical as a Cloud 2 Cloud Migration.

I hope you have enjoyed this article; I read you in the comments 😁