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Data moving out of the cloud costs money. Data moving in is usually free. Plan for the difference.
Quick Definition
Egress is data flowing out of a network or service; ingress is data flowing in. In cloud pricing, ingress is usually free while egress is charged, making egress a key cost consideration for architectures that move large volumes of data.
Ingress is data flowing into a cloud provider's network; egress is data flowing out. Providers almost always make ingress free and charge for egress, by the gigabyte, with rates that vary by destination. Traffic leaving to the internet costs the most, traffic between regions costs less, and traffic within a zone is often free.
This pricing shapes architecture more than most teams expect. Chatty services split across regions, analytics pipelines that pull data out to other tools, and backups shipped to another provider all generate steady egress charges that rarely appear in initial estimates.
Example. A media company stores video in one region and serves global users directly from it. Egress runs to thousands per month. Adding a CDN and keeping processing in-region cuts the transfer bill by more than half.
Egress is also the quiet enforcer of vendor lock-in, since moving large datasets out has a real price tag. Map your data flows early. The Cloud Cost Management Guide covers transfer costs in depth.
Providers want your data inside their platform, where it generates compute and storage revenue. Charging for exit, not entry, encourages that.
Keep services that talk to each other in the same region or zone, cache with a CDN, compress transfers, and avoid unnecessary cross-region replication.
Often yes. Cross-zone and cross-region traffic between your own resources is billable on most providers.