[ncc-services-wg] Exit Strategy for Cloud Services

Dear colleagues,

First of all, I would like to thank you all for the engaged discussions and
feedback received during RIPE 88 last week.

Following up on some of the questions raised during my presentation last
week, I would like to clarify a couple of points, mostly around RIPE NCC’s
exit strategy for our cloud providers. First point raised was concerning
the exit cost for AWS S3 should we decide to move to a different provider,
potentially at very short notice. As part of the AWS S3 pricing model, a
certain amount is charged for egress costs. Due to the large amount of data
we have stored in AWS (in the order of petabytes of uncompressed data),
this could potentially lead to a large bill. However, following the
direction set by the European Data Act, AWS decided to waive all egress
fees for customers migrating their data to a competitor (or to on-premise):
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/free-data-transfer-out-to-internet-when-moving-out-of-aws/
However, even in a partial exit scenario, where we decide to stay with AWS
but move only one service out, and thus egress costs waiving would not
apply, the S3 exit cost for the Atlas historical data would be in the order
of a few thousand euros.

The other point raised was about our exit strategy in general, not only
referring to egress costs. Our strategy is to use industry standards (e.g.
Kubernetes) as a way to mitigate switching costs, as many providers offer
alternative solutions. That is true for both AWS S3 and Kubernetes, having
similar solutions offered by other companies. We also pay very close
attention to our backup strategy (e.g. having the data stored elsewhere)
and diversifying our suppliers.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Kind regards,


Felipe Victolla Silveira

Chief Technology Officer

RIPE NCC
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