Hidden AWS Data Transfer Costs That Can Silently Inflate Your Cloud Bill
AWS charges for data transfer based on how far data travels and how many network boundaries it crosses, with costs ranging from free within the same Availability Zone to around $0.09 per GB for internet egress. Cross-AZ traffic, often overlooked, costs roughly $0.01 per GB in each direction and can accumulate significantly when high-traffic services are split across zones. NAT gateways add a processing fee of about $0.045 per GB, which can be largely avoided by using free VPC gateway endpoints for services like S3 and DynamoDB. Placing a CDN such as CloudFront in front of S3 or EC2 can reduce egress costs, since transfer from S3 to CloudFront is free and CloudFront rates are generally lower than raw egress rates. Engineers can identify which transfer types are driving costs by using AWS Cost Explorer to filter and group charges by usage type, then tracing the largest contributors back to specific services or architecture decisions.
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