Definition
Cloud ingress: Data flowing into a cloud region from the public internet, from another cloud provider, or from on premise infrastructure. Free of charge at all three hyperscalers under standard contracts. The counterpart to cloud egress, which is metered. Sits inside the broader cloud data transfer pricing category.
The economics are deliberate. Cloud providers want data in. Once data lives in the cloud, compute, storage, analytics, and AI services generate revenue against it. Free ingress lowers the barrier to migration. Metered egress raises the cost of exit. The two together create asymmetric switching cost that pushes most workloads to stay where the data lives.
There are narrow exceptions. AWS Direct Connect carries hourly port fees plus per GB transfer fees that apply to both directions through the dedicated link, although the per GB rate undercuts internet egress meaningfully. Azure ExpressRoute and Google Cloud Interconnect behave similarly. For standard internet ingress over public routing, all three providers charge zero. The cost driver in any enterprise architecture is egress, not ingress. See the cloud cost management definition for the broader optimization context.
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Ingress in cloud migration planning
Ingress matters for migration timeline, not for run cost. A 500 TB on premise database arriving via AWS Snowball or Azure Data Box carries device fees but zero ingress charge. The same data moved over public internet at high parallel throughput will saturate the on premise WAN before it costs anything cloud side. The bottleneck is rarely cloud cost and almost always source side bandwidth or transformation time.
Frequently asked questions
What is cloud ingress?
Cloud ingress is data flowing into a cloud region from the public internet or from another cloud provider. Under standard contracts at AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, internet ingress is free in 2026.
Is cloud ingress always free?
Internet ingress is free at AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud under standard contracts. Some specialty services charge for ingress through their managed pipe, including AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute, and Google Cloud Interconnect, which carry per GB transfer fees in both directions through the dedicated link.
Why is ingress free but egress charged?
Cloud providers want data flowing in. Once in, the data is sticky. Compute, storage, and analytics fees generate revenue on the resident data. Free ingress lowers the barrier to migration. Metered egress raises the cost of exit. This asymmetry is the central economic mechanic of public cloud lock in.
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