MelbourneAWS access controls drove out a 15-year user.
Egress costs 9¢/GB; Identity and Access Management complexity grows with each added service, compounding the exit penalty.
No provider discloses cloud reversibility costs.
Sources: Hacker News
tech
AWS Complexity Breaks Converts
Background
THE EGRESS ASYMMETRY
Ingress is free; egress is metered. AWS charges roughly 9¢ per GB to move data out, while ingress costs nothing. This asymmetry is not a technical necessity — bandwidth is bidirectional — it is a deliberate exit tax that compounds with the size of your data estate.
WHY IAM GETS WORSE OVER TIME
AWS IAM is policy-based: every service, resource, and principal has its own permission surface. Adding a service does not just add a feature — it adds a new permissions namespace that must be reconciled with every existing one. Complexity is combinatorial, not additive.
THE LOCK-IN LADDER
Lock-in is not one decision. It is a ladder: compute (easy to move), storage (egress-taxed), managed databases (proprietary engines like DynamoDB, Aurora), and finally identity and serverless glue (IAM, Lambda, EventBridge). Each rung is harder to unclimb than the last.
THE UNDISCLOSED NUMBER
Cloud providers publish per-GB and per-hour rates but never publish the cost of leaving. There is no standard disclosure of total egress volume, no estimate of re-architecture effort, no portability score. The customer discovers the exit price only by trying to exit.
THE HYPERSCALER CONCENTRATION
AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud together hold roughly two-thirds of global cloud infrastructure spend. This concentration means the pricing conventions of three companies — including the egress fee structure — effectively govern the cost of moving data on the internet.