Comparison
Egress chargevsStorage lifecycle policy
Egress charge
the compute was predictable and the surprise on the invoice was gigabytes leaving the provider, at a rate nobody had modelled.
The cost of moving data out of a cloud provider to the internet or to another provider. It is asymmetric — inbound is typically free — which is what makes it both a cost surprise and a genuine lock-in mechanism, since leaving means paying to take your data with you. It also drives architecture: a caching layer or a delivery network in front of heavy outbound traffic is frequently a cost decision rather than a latency one.
Full entry →Storage lifecycle policy
objects older than ninety days move to cheap cold storage automatically, and reading one back now costs money and minutes.
Rules that move or delete stored data as it ages, shifting it between access tiers with different storage and retrieval prices. It is a large saving on data that is written once and rarely read, and its trap is retrieval: cold tiers charge to read and archive tiers add hours of delay. Applying one to data a pipeline still scans converts a storage saving into a much larger retrieval bill.
Full entry →