Predictable Cloud Egress Is Finally Here: How Megaport Unlocks It All

By Steve Tu, Senior Director, Technical GTM & Strategic Incubation

Discover how AWS Direct Connect flat-rate pricing makes cloud egress predictable and how Megaport enables high-volume data migration.

AWS has announced flat-rate pricing for Direct Connect, bringing more predictable egress costs to eligible 10 Gbps and 100 Gbps Dedicated Connections.

Here’s what the new egress pricing model means for bulk data migration, plus how Megaport helps you make the most of it with private connectivity to the storage and compute your workloads need.

From variable egress to fixed-capacity economics

Traditional AWS Direct Connect pricing combines port-hour charges with per-gigabyte data transfer out (DTO). For bulk migrations, teams may need to set a budget before they know exactly how much data they’ll move, leaving uncertainty around the final egress cost.

But with flat-rate pricing, you pay a fixed hourly fee for your connection, with eligible outbound data transfers included (the AWS Regions covered depend on your chosen geographic tier). Moving more eligible data over the same connection during the same period doesn’t increase that fee, so the cost per gigabyte falls as usage grows.

It’s important to note that the fee doesn’t cover the entire migration. Traffic outside your selected tier, transit traffic, and AWS SiteLink traffic are charged separately. Other AWS services, partner connectivity, and Hosted Connections also remain separate. The offer applies only to eligible Dedicated Connections.

For bulk migration, this means you can budget for eligible AWS egress based on how long the connection is provisioned, rather than how many gigabytes you move. You still need to account for costs across the full migration path, but this part of the bill becomes predictable.

When does a 10G flat-rate connection pay off?

Flat-rate pricing doesn’t automatically mean a lower bill; its value depends on how much data you’re moving. But for sustained, high-volume transfers, there’s a point where the fixed price will become more economical than paying separately for the port and each gigabyte transferred.

Take, for example, a 10G Dedicated Connection on a U.S. Tier 1 path from us-east-1 to Ashburn. With metered pricing, the current published rate is USD $2.25/hour for the port, plus USD $0.02/GB for DTO. With flat-rate pricing, the same example costs USD $10.96/hour, with eligible DTO included.

Over a 30-day month, the metered port itself costs USD $1,620 while the flat-rate connection costs approximately USD $7,891. The important difference is that the metered option continues to add USD $0.02 for every gigabyte transferred, while eligible outbound transfers are already included in the flat-rate price.

Based on those rates, the two options reach roughly the same AWS cost at 314,000 GB, or just over 300 TB of outbound data per month. That equates to around 1 Gbps of sustained throughput.

Below that transfer volume, metered pricing costs less in this example. Above it, the additional per-GB charges mean flat-rate will cost less. And for large migrations where the final data volume or transfer window may change, flat-rate also gives teams a known AWS Direct Connect cost to plan around.

This is an AWS-only comparison rather than an end-to-end migration quote. Geography, discounts, redundancy, Megaport connectivity, and other services can change the overall cost.

Megaport delivers 10G and 100G reach where your data needs to go

Predictable AWS pricing only solves part of the budget problem. Your data still needs a private path to its next destination.

Megaport combines broad Dedicated Direct Connect access with a network spanning 1,200 + enabled locations. Our 10G and 100G connectivity options give customers the capacity to move large data volumes across that network to supported storage, compute, and data center destinations.

With Megaport AWS Direct Connect connectivity, your AWS Dedicated Connection links physically to a Megaport Port, then extends across our network using a private Virtual Cross Connect (VXC). Deploy it yourself in the Portal, or have our team coordinate your setup with you.

Petabyte-scale migration to Megaport Storage and Compute

Once you can predict your costs for moving petabytes out of AWS, the bigger opportunity is deciding where that data should live and how it will be used next.

Megaport Storage

Megaport Storage offers Standard Object Storage for backups and retention, and High-Performance Object Storage for active data sets and analytics. Our S3-compatible object storage supports familiar workflows, with zero storage egress fees for access over the Megaport fabric to make your data costs even more predictable.

Use it as a neutral repository outside any single hyperscaler, then connect that data to the cloud or compute platform each workload needs. This approach prevents lock-in across your cloud network. (Application dependencies still need their own migration plan.)

Megaport Compute

Megaport Compute, powered by Latitude.sh, adds dedicated CPU and GPU infrastructure with private connectivity through the same network. That creates another option for processing data outside a hyperscaler.

This integrated approach to storage, network, and compute connects predictable AWS outbound transfer costs with infrastructure that gives customers more choice over where their data lives and runs.

Megaport partner ecosystem

This new flat-rate pricing also feeds into the broader Megaport partner ecosystem in ways that amplifying the benefits of flat-rate egress. Instead of finding yourself locked in to hyperscaler pricing for storage or GPUs, your data will be on a neutral network with on-ramps to more than 1,200 data centers.

For instance, if you need to run heavy AI inference workloads, it will now be possible to pull petabytes of data out of AWS and transfer it to specialized bare metal compute infrastructure on a dedicated Megaport 10G or 100G connection — without running afoul of the hyperscaler tax or getting locked in to hyperscaler GPU pricing.

Model your 10G or 100G migration path with Megaport

Talk to our team about building a predictable, privately connected path from AWS to the storage and compute infrastructure your workloads need, with a neutral multicloud network enabler.