The Data Has to Get There Somehow

When teams price out a cloud bill they count instances, storage, and licenses. What they almost never count is the wire. Your data has to get from where it is to where it is processed, and there are only so many ways to do that: over the shared internet, or over a private link you pay for separately. The book makes a version of this point about SKUs (chapter 3): the differences that matter between two SKUs, like network throughput, rarely show up in a price comparison. 1 Private connectivity is that problem at a larger scale, and it is worth spelling out what it actually costs.

What a private link is

If you are dealing with sensitive data, or if you need predictable latency and throughput, moving it over the shared internet may not be good enough. The three big clouds each sell a private physical link: AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute, Google Cloud Dedicated Interconnect. These are real fiber ports at a colocation facility, wired to the cloud provider’s edge router. You bring the data center, or you colocate in one that already peers with them; the provider brings the other end.

Two things get billed. First, a fixed charge for the port itself, billed by the hour regardless of how much traffic runs over it. Second, a per-gigabyte charge for the data that flows out of the cloud over that link, which is lower than internet egress but not zero. Inbound is free in all three. 1 2

What the price sheets say

AWS lists a dedicated 1 Gbps Direct Connect port at $0.30 per hour, about $219 per month; 10 Gbps is $2.25 per hour, about $1,643. Data transfer out over Direct Connect from a US region to a US location is $0.02 per GB, versus $0.09 per GB over the public internet, roughly a 78% discount on the egress rate. Hosted connections through a partner start much lower, at $0.03 per hour for 50 Mbps, so a small business can get a private link for about $22 a month before the colocation provider’s own cross-connect fee. 1

Azure’s ExpressRoute works differently. The circuit itself is priced per port speed under two data plans. The metered plan charges a monthly port fee, $436 for 1 Gbps Standard, plus per-GB outbound data ($0.025/GB in Zone 1). The unlimited plan folds data transfer into a single fixed fee, $5,700/month for 1 Gbps Standard in Zone 1, which breaks even somewhere around 65% of the port’s sustained utilization. Azure also sells Direct, a physical port pair, at $6,000/month for 10 Gbps in Zone 1. 2

Google’s Dedicated Interconnect prices the circuit by the hour ($2.328/hour for 10 Gbps, about $1,700/month), then adds a separate hourly VLAN attachment ($0.10/hour for 1-10 Gbps), then adds egress per GiB, $0.02 in North America. Its Cross-Cloud Interconnect, which links AWS or Azure to GCP over private fiber, is the multicloud version of the same idea: $5.60/hour for a 10 Gbps circuit, about $4,032/month. 3

The internal stuff, too

Even without a physical private link, the per-GB metering inside the cloud can surprise you. AWS charges $0.01/GB in each direction for traffic that crosses an Availability Zone boundary, so a request and its response inside the same region, across zones, cost $0.02 per GB round-trip, and VPC peering traffic within a region is metered the same way, $0.01/GB per direction. Azure’s VNet peering in the same region charges $0.01/GB inbound and $0.01/GB outbound, so the round trip is billed at both ends. Azure also removed cross-AZ transfer charges entirely in May 2024, so moving data between availability zones in the same region no longer bills at all on Azure. AWS and Google still meter the cross-zone path. 4

The pattern

Two observations. First, the fixed and variable parts sit in different places depending on the provider: AWS charges you for the port and then less per GB; Google charges for the circuit, the attachment, and the egress; Azure lets you trade one for the other. There is no single right model, and the question is which side of the fixed/variable line your traffic pattern falls on. A workload with steady, heavy volume tends to favor the flat plans; a bursty one can end up overpaying for a flat plan it does not use.

Second, the per-GB charges that look small, $0.01, $0.02, $0.05, are per gigabyte, which means they scale with volume. A workload doing 50 TB of cross-AZ traffic per month pays $1,000 just for the round trips between zones. At some point the question is not what the port costs but what your traffic is actually doing, and the answer usually surprises people when they first add it up.

Sources

1. AWS, “AWS Direct Connect Pay-as-you-go Pricing” (aws.amazon.com), accessed October 25, 2026 — dedicated port-hour rates $0.30/hr (1 Gbps) and $2.25/hr (10 Gbps); hosted connections from $0.03/hr (50 Mbps); data transfer out $0.02/GB from US regions to US Direct Connect locations; data transfer in free.

2. Microsoft Azure, “Azure ExpressRoute Pricing” (azure.microsoft.com), accessed October 25, 2026 — metered plan: 1 Gbps Standard circuit $436/month plus $0.025/GB outbound in Zone 1; unlimited plan: 1 Gbps Standard $5,700/month including data transfer; ExpressRoute Direct 10 Gbps port pair $6,000/month Zone 1.

3. Google Cloud, “Cloud Interconnect Pricing” (cloud.google.com), accessed October 25, 2026 — Dedicated Interconnect 10 Gbps circuit $2.328/hour; VLAN attachment $0.10/hour; egress over the interconnect $0.02/GiB (North America); Cross-Cloud Interconnect 10 Gbps circuit $5.60/hour (about $4,032/month at 30 days).

4. AWS, “Amazon VPC Pricing” (aws.amazon.com) — $0.01/GB each direction for cross-AZ traffic within a region, free intra-AZ, VPC peering intra-region $0.01/GB, inter-region per EC2 pricing. Microsoft Azure, “Azure Virtual Network Pricing” (azure.microsoft.com) — VNet peering same-region $0.01/GB inbound and outbound, cross-zone (AZ) traffic free as of May 21, 2024. Google Cloud, “Network pricing” (cloud.google.com) — cross-zone within region $0.01/GiB each direction, same-zone free. All accessed October 25, 2026.