An important announcement during this year’s Microsoft Build has not gotten much traction and might have been missed in the vast amount of updates and announcements.
Microsoft did an update to its pricing structure for inter-zone traffic.
“We are announcing that Azure will not charge for the data transfer across availability zones regardless of using private or public IPs on your Azure resources.”
-> https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/update-on-interavailability-zone-data-transfer-pricing/
They drop the charges for traffic between Availability Zones within an Azure region. Before that, you were charged $0.01 per GB.
As of writing this blog article, 07.06.2024, GCP and AWS still charge for inter-zone traffic. For GCP, it is $0.01 per GB, and for AWS, it is $0.01 per GB.
-> https://cloud.google.com/vpc/network-pricing
“Data transferred “in” to and “out” from Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX), and Amazon ElastiCache instances, Elastic Network Interfaces or VPC Peering connections across Availability Zones in the same AWS Region is charged at $0.01/GB in each direction.”
-> https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/#Data_Transfer_within_the_same_AWS_Region