Microsoft drops Azure egress fees following the European Data Act

Azure is one of the most used cloud services, however, it has some questionable policies that negatively affect the users.

That’s about to change, as  Microsoft is changing its policy on data removal from the Azure cloud.

There will be no more egress fees on Microsoft Azure

As reported by The Register, Microsoft won’t charge its former users to remove their data from the Azure cloud.

This comes as no surprise since Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google do the same, so it feels natural for Microsoft to follow suit.

The reason for this change is the European Data Act, as stated by Microsoft in its announcement post.

To be eligible to move your data, Microsoft documentation states the following:

You must cancel all Azure subscriptions associated with your account after your data is transferred out before you can request your invoice-level credit.

It’s important to mention that Azure offers the first 100GB/month of egress data for free, but now you can easily claim more credit.

Some experts claim that this is just a marketing move to attract new customers and that egress costs affect ongoing users the most.

As for Azure, some believe that Claude 3 is a threat to Microsoft Azure, and we’re still waiting to see how will Microsoft respond to it.