'My Data Transfer Bill Cost What?': When Cloud Economics Go Wrong
David Aronchick
The email arrived on a Tuesday morning: "Your cloud bill for last month: $2.4 million." The CFO's response was immediate: "That's 3x our budget. What the hell are we running?" The answer? Nothing special. Just a standard data analytics workload that happened to cross availability zones. A lot. Turns out, 80% of that bill—nearly $2 million—was data egress fees. Not compute. Not storage. Just the privilege of moving their own data between regions to serve global customers. Welcome to 2025, where y