Oracle has joined the Bandwidth Alliance, a group of cloud service providers organized by anti-DDoS content network Cloudflare to reduce data egress fees.
Under the agreement, Oracle will offer Cloudflare customers free data egress from its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage service.
Cloud service providers typically allow customers to load content into their networks for free but then charge them to take it out again. This approach makes for “sticky” services that customers are loath to leave. Four in every five cloud companies are overspending on cloud, according to research released in September.
Cloudflare launched the partnership scheme in September 2018 to lower prices for customers. Under the Alliance's agreement, cloud vendors and networking companies discount or waive egress fees for customers that also use Cloudflare's services.
“Businesses deserve choice and fair pricing, but unfortunately certain vendors choose to lock in customers by making it prohibitively expensive to transfer data out,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “We started the Bandwidth Alliance to counter this threat and work with others to pass bandwidth cost savings along to businesses. We applaud Oracle for joining the mission to bring businesses the benefits of vendor choice and lower egress fees.”
Oracle already offers free outbound transfer from its cloud service for the first 10TB for each regional zone or product SKU.
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Free data egress will make it easier to support multi-cloud services, in which companies distribute workloads across different cloud service providers. Oracle and Microsoft already operate a multi-cloud partnership that enables UK customers to connect Azure and Oracle cloud directly in the London region.
Existing members of the Bandwidth Alliance include Microsoft, Google, Alibaba and Tencent. Cloudflare has been aggressive in targeting Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has not joined its initiative. The security company launched a rival storage service to AWS S3 in September.
