💸Multi-Cloud Egress Costs Are Skyrocketing
Your multi-cloud bill is about to get a lot bigger
TL;DR
Multi-cloud architectures are racking up unexpected egress costs. Services placed and how they communicate matter more than negotiated rates. A single checkout request can fan out across multiple services, driving up costs.
Multi-cloud systems are incurring significant egress costs due to data leaving networks rather than entering them. These costs accumulate silently and are rarely caught before deployment. Architecture, not per-unit transfer rates, determines egress costs. A single checkout request can fan out across multiple services, increasing costs. Changing communication patterns from synchronous cross-cloud processing to near-source processing saved over $2000 per month. Multi-cloud architectures should optimize for availability, vendor capabilities, and geographic reach at design time.
Key Points
Cloud providers charge $0.09/GB for egress (first 10 TB) + $0.045/GB NAT Gateway + $0.01/GB cross-AZ for AWS.
Azure's egress cost is $0.087/GB (Zone 1) + $0.02/GB inter-region; zone-to-zone: free.
Google Cloud charges $0.12/GB to internet + $0.01 to $0.08/GB inter-region; Interconnect discounts apply.
Cross-cloud synchronous communication creates hidden network transfer costs, verified in Q1 2026 pricing.
A single-cloud deployment avoids interprovider transfer costs entirely for the same workload.
Why It Matters
If you're running a multi-cloud system with services like a product catalogue on AWS, recommendation engine on GCP, and fraud detection on Azure, you're likely incurring hidden egress costs. Changing communication patterns from synchronous to near-source processing can save over $2000 per month. Make cost control a structural property of your system from the start.
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