My (peripheral) experience is that it is much cheaper to get data in than to get data out. When you have the amount of data being discussed — "Enterprise data. Going back years." — that can get very costly.

It's the amount of data where it makes more sense to put hard drives on a truck and drive across the country rather than send it over a network, where this becomes an issue (actually, probably a bit before then).

AWS actually has a service for this - Snowmobile, a storage datacenter inside of a shipping container, which is driven to you on a semi truck. https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/

They do not!

> Q: Can I export data from AWS with Snowmobile? > > Snowmobile does not support data export. It is designed to let you quickly, easily, and more securely migrate exabytes of data to AWS. When you need to export data from AWS, you can use AWS Snowball Edge to quickly export up to 100TB per appliance and run multiple export jobs in parallel as necessary. Visit the Snowball Edge FAQs to learn more.

https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/faqs/?nc2=h_mo-lang

Why would they make it convenient to leave?

Oh, TIL! Thanks for correcting me.

That's only for data into AWS though, not data out

Just in network costs, there's a huge asymmetry. Uploading data to AWS is free. Downloading data from them, you have to pay.

When you have enough data, that cost is quite significant.

The ingress/egress cost is ridiculously high. Some companies don't care, but it is there and I've seen it catch people off guard multiple times.

Oh come on from the description both accounts could be sitting on the same datacenter LAN.

There's a cost for data egress (but not ingress)

It’s the cost of data egress, which isn’t free.

But there is no paid egress when we are moving data between account within one region, rigth?

There is. You pay a price for any cross-VPC traffic.

This isn't true, at least not anymore.

You can peer two vpc's and as long as you are transferring within the same (real) AZ, it's free: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/05/amazon-vp...

Even peered VPC's only pay "normal" prices: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/#Data_Transfer

"Data transferred "in" to and "out" from Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX), and Amazon ElastiCache instances, Elastic Network Interfaces or VPC Peering connections across Availability Zones in the same AWS Region is charged at $0.01/GB in each direction."