Cross-AZ charges reduced within VMware Cloud on AWS – VMware Cloud Community
Over the past three years of continuous operations, we have relentlessly optimized and improved the VMware Cloud on AWS service. Today we’re ecstatic to announce that we’ve effectively removed Stretched Cluster Cross-AZ charges from within the service.
Why the change?
A little over a year ago, we reduced the price of Cross-AZ charges by 95%. With three years of customer data to review, we’ve determined that we can relax 100% of the charges for our customers. Effective immediately, ten petabytes per month of Cross-AZ charges are included with any Stretched Cluster deployed within the service from this point forward.
What is Cross AZ traffic?
The AWS Cloud uses Availability Zones to isolate failure domains. While there is no restriction or additional fees for network traffic within an AZ, Amazon does meter any network traffic passed into or out of an AZ.
In the case of Stretched Clusters with VMware Cloud on AWS, Cross AZ traffic includes both management traffic as well as any guest traffic. The management traffic within a Stretched Cluster has been engineered to reduce cross-AZ communication as much as possible. For example, vSAN Read Locality will intelligently read from any local copy of the data avoiding cross-site communication.
What does this mean for existing customers?
This change essentially removes Stretched Cluster Cross-AZ charges from within the service. All additional metered connections are still subject to the existing billing arrangement. This change impacts only the Cross-AZ traffic associated with vSAN Stretched Clusters.
Summary
The VMware Cloud on AWS service continues its relentless march to simplify hybrid operations within the AWS cloud. By including Cross-AZ charges in the service, we are trying to provide simplified billing to our customers. If you’ve been looking at VMware Cloud wondering if it was time to let go of the mundane, there has never been a better time to move faster into the future!
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