Expand to More Regions and Clouds with Zero Additional Egress Cost

Data providers want their data available to their customers, no matter where in the world or on which cloud service provider the customer is located. However, egress costs can contribute up to 70% of total data transfer costs. Providers have historically had to balance the desire to increase the availability of their data to any relevant Snowflake regions with the need to manage egress costs. With Snowflake Egress Cost Optimizer (ECO), customers no longer need to pay egress costs to share the same data to additional cloud regions (after the first egress). ECO provides cost-efficient data sharing across any Snowflake region or cloud on AWS, GCP and Azure by intelligently routing data, with potential savings up to 96% in egress costs (assuming replication from AWS US West to all Snowflake Commercial and Gov regions). With the advantage of reduced data transfer cost and overall cost of ownership, Snowflake data providers can now reach consumers around the world without worrying about which Snowflake cloud region they’re in. 

Overview

One of the top reasons providers limit the availability of their data across cloud regions is the egress costs. For customers who are transferring the same data sets from one region to others, egress costs are repetitive and prohibitive to expanding availability. This results in content that is available to customers only in certain Snowflake regions. 

Egress Cost Optimizer uses an intelligent algorithm to understand Snowflake listing setups for data transfer, such as consumer regions and underlying cloud providers, and automatically delivers the most cost-efficient path to transfer data. Egress Cost Optimizer does not impact any of the existing security, features and performance commitments of listings, such as support for data encryption in transit and rest through Snowflake Tri-Secret Secure (TSS), or existing Cross-Cloud Auto Fulfillment features (for example, object-level replication, listing-schedule-based data refresh and listing refresh history). There is no impact to query latency by using Egress Cost Optimizer. See more details on how Egress Cost Optimizer works here.

With Egress Cost Optimizer, customers are paying cross-cloud egress costs once. Thus, they can expand availability to all Snowflake regions with zero additional egress costs. This feature is only available for Cross-Cloud Auto-Fulfillment and not for manual replication.

Note: The Egress Cost Optimizer cache uses third-party subprocessors that adhere to the Snowflake data processing addendum. You can find complete information here about the region in which your data is processed by our subprocessor.

Tutorial

Before the Egress Cost Optimizer can be used, it must be authorized for your organization. You can refer to documentation here.

To authorize the Egress Cost Optimizer, do the following:

1. Sign in to Snowsight as a user that has been granted the ORGADMIN privilege.

2. In the navigation menu, select Data Products » Provider Studio.

3. First-time users can directly click “Get Started” from the banner on the Home tab. You can also enable using the Settings tab.

4. Click Acknowledge and Enable.

Egress cost optimization can be enabled at an organizational level for all accounts. Once enabled, individual accounts can disable and re-enable it.

Note: You can only enable Egress Cost Optimizer through Snowsight. If you had previously accepted Egress Cost Optimizer terms, you can view them by navigating as described and clicking View terms.

To disable, use a command similar to:

To re-enable, use a command similar to:

For more information, see ALTER ACCOUNT. 

If you are replicating to other regions where Egress Cost Optimizer is used, you are charged for ECO at $16.896 per TB-month. If ECO is not used because your data transfer is already optimized (for example,fewer than two regions and within the same cloud provider), you are not charged for ECO.

Recap

Snowflake users want to meet their customers in whichever cloud region those customers have their Snowflake instances. However, egress costs can contribute up to 70% of total data transfer costs. With Snowflake Egress Cost Optimizer, users no longer need to pay high egress costs. ECO reduces data transfer costs to any region or cloud across AWS, GCP and Azure by intelligently routing data, saving up to 96% in egress costs. 

With the advantage of zero additional egress costs after the first egress, Snowflake customers can now reach consumers around the world without worrying about underlying cloud providers and regions. You can get started by enabling Egress Cost Optimizer in Snowflake Provider Studio. Once enabled at an organization level, it is automatically turned on for all accounts. Accounts can always disable ECO by going to Snowflake Provider Studio Settings. Egress Cost Optimizer has no impact on existing data security postures such as TSS, end-to-end encryption and data processing addendum, and it keeps the same level of query performance. Egress Cost Optimizer enables you to pay the cross-cloud egress cost once, so you can replicate as broadly as you need to without racking up egress costs.

Get started

Get started with Snowflake listing today to share data across all Snowflake regions and accounts.