Google Cloud says it is cutting data transfer fees to/between other cloud providers – but only for certain services running over the public internet, not over its higher speed cross-cloud interconnect or cloud interconnect.
Google Cloud’s new Data Transfer Essentials (DTE) service can be used for data flows between 17 cloud service providers (CSPs) and associated autonomous system numbers (ASNs). It lists Amazon, Alibaba, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, OVHCloud, and UpCloud, but not many smaller CSPs.
The service notably comes with no SLA and it is Google Cloud that reserves the right to “validate an IP address as a legitimate intra-organization CSP destination”, as its documentation shows.
The new service is NOT for serving third-party customers, Google Cloud emphasised today – and adds that users can “create only one Data Transfer Essentials configuration per region per project.” (Details.)
The 21 Google Cloud services covered by DTE include AlloyDB, API Gateway, BigQuery Storage API, Cloud SQL, Datastore, Remote Build Execution, and Pub/Sub, among others. All but one of the supported services are only included on DTE if users are already at the more expensive premium Network Service tier as well, which Google recommends to all large enterprises and cloud native service providers.
The move comes ahead of many provisions of the EU Data Act coming into force on September 12. The Act, as law firm Skadden puts it, requires cloud service providers to “make pricing for data transfer and disengagement more transparent, and [ensure] technical compatibility for transferring data, applications, and digital assets between services, as well as standardized interfaces and data formats where applicable…”
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