Short answer: Oracle cloud egress cost is the per-gigabyte fee a cloud provider charges to move data off its network — roughly $0.087–$0.12/GB on Azure, AWS and GCP after small free tiers, versus 10 TB free then ~$0.0085/GB on OCI. For replication-heavy Oracle workloads spread across clouds, these fees plus interconnect circuit charges routinely erase a large slice of BYOL and multi-cloud savings.
Key Takeaways
- Egress is billed by the hyperscaler, not Oracle — typical 2026 list rates run ~$0.09/GB (AWS), ~$0.087/GB (Azure) and ~$0.12/GB (GCP); OCI gives 10 TB/month free then ~$0.0085/GB (provider price lists, 2026).
- Cross-cloud egress and interconnect claw back 12–28% of the modeled three-year saving on a typical multi-cloud Oracle architecture (Oracle Licensing Experts benchmark, 2026).
- Data Guard and GoldenGate are the worst offenders — every committed change is shipped continuously to a standby or target in another provider's network, where each gigabyte is billed at the source egress rate.
- The OCI–Azure and OCI–GCP Interconnects remove per-GB transfer charges in paired regions but still cost real money in FastConnect/ExpressRoute circuit ports and partner connectivity.
- BYOL cuts license-included compute cost but does nothing for data movement — egress must be modeled alongside licensing, never after the architecture is fixed.
- The single biggest lever is co-location: keep the database and its heaviest consumers in the same cloud and region, and reserve cross-cloud paths for traffic that genuinely needs them.
How much does Oracle cloud egress actually cost across AWS, Azure, GCP and OCI?
Oracle cloud egress cost is the charge a public cloud provider applies to data leaving its network — to the public internet, to another region, or to a different cloud. Oracle does not bill this charge; the hyperscaler does. That distinction matters because it means egress never appears on an Oracle order form, never enters the licensing negotiation, and is rarely benchmarked by the procurement team that just spent months right-sizing processor counts.
The rates look trivial on paper and dangerous at scale. After modest free tiers, internet egress lands at roughly $0.09/GB on AWS, $0.087/GB on Azure and $0.12/GB on Google Cloud as of 2026. OCI is the structural outlier: 10 TB of free egress per month, then about $0.0085/GB — an order of magnitude cheaper, and a deliberate competitive lever Oracle uses to pull database workloads onto its own infrastructure. A single high-transaction Oracle Database replicating across a cloud boundary can push terabytes per day, turning "a few cents" into a six-figure annual line item.
| Provider | Free tier (monthly) | Typical egress rate after free tier | Cross-cloud relevance |
|---|---|---|---|
| AWS | 100 GB | ~$0.09/GB (tiers down at volume) | EC2/RDS BYOL workloads shipping data out |
| Microsoft Azure | 100 GB | ~$0.087/GB | Oracle on Azure VMs; Database@Azure paths |
| Google Cloud | 200 GB (varies) | ~$0.12/GB | Oracle on GCP / Database@Google Cloud |
| Oracle OCI | 10 TB | ~$0.0085/GB | Primary or standby for Oracle Database estates |
Oracle's account teams cheerfully quote OCI's near-free egress when they want your database on OCI — and stay silent about egress when the workload sits on a competitor's cloud. The asymmetry is the point. Treat any "the clouds are basically the same" pitch as a prompt to model data movement yourself, because the provider with the cheapest egress is rarely the one whose sales rep is in the room.
Why do Oracle Data Guard and GoldenGate deployments trigger the biggest egress bills?
Data Guard is Oracle's physical standby replication technology; Active Data Guard and GoldenGate extend it to read-open standbys and heterogeneous, logical replication. All three work by continuously shipping change data — redo or trail files — from a primary database to one or more targets. When the primary and the standby live in different clouds, every byte of that change stream crosses a billed boundary, around the clock, forever.
This is the trap that the resilience architecture creates and the licensing review never catches. The decision to place a standby in a second cloud is usually justified on availability grounds, then the licensing team confirms you hold the Data Guard or GoldenGate option — itself a separately licensed Oracle product — and the design is signed off. Nobody prices the redo stream. A database generating 1 TB of redo per day shipped cross-cloud at $0.09/GB is roughly $90/day, or about $33,000 a year, per replicated database — before a single user query touches the network.
The right-size move is to interrogate which databases genuinely require cross-cloud resilience versus in-region or same-cloud standby, and to route any unavoidable cross-cloud replication over a dedicated interconnect rather than metered internet egress. Our Oracle license optimization service models the replication topology and the option licensing together, so the resilience design and the data-movement bill are decided in the same conversation.
What is the OCI–Azure (and OCI–GCP) Interconnect, and where are its hidden costs?
The OCI Interconnect is a dedicated, low-latency network path between Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and a partner hyperscaler — most maturely with Microsoft Azure, and more recently with Google Cloud — built on Oracle FastConnect paired with the partner's ExpressRoute or Cloud Interconnect. In supported paired regions it removes the per-gigabyte data-transfer charge across that link, which is why Oracle markets it as "no egress fees between OCI and Azure."
"No per-GB charge" is not "free." You still pay for the FastConnect circuit and its port speed, for the ExpressRoute or Cloud Interconnect circuit on the partner side, and frequently for a connectivity partner if you are not co-located in a supported data center. Traffic that leaves either cloud by any other path — to the public internet, to a third cloud, to an on-premise data center — reverts to standard metered egress. The interconnect solves one specific leg of the journey; it does nothing for the rest of your data topology.
How do egress costs undermine Oracle BYOL and multi-cloud savings?
BYOL (Bring Your Own License) lets you apply licenses you already own to cloud compute instead of paying license-included rates. It is a genuine saving — but it is a saving on the license line only. BYOL does nothing for data movement, and the very architectures people adopt to maximize BYOL flexibility tend to maximize cross-cloud traffic: a database licensed under BYOL in one cloud feeding analytics, application tiers, or a standby in another.
The result is a business case that looks compelling on compute and licensing and disappoints on the invoice. Across our engagements, cross-cloud egress and interconnect charges claw back 12–28% of the modeled three-year saving on a typical multi-cloud Oracle architecture that was costed on compute and licensing alone (Oracle Licensing Experts benchmark, 2026). The fix is sequencing: model data movement before the topology is frozen, not after. For the licensing half of that equation, our Oracle BYOL to OCI guide covers entitlement verification, and the Oracle Cloud Licensing Guide sets out the full cross-cloud framework.
Is data movement eroding your multi-cloud Oracle savings?
Our Oracle Cloud advisory service models egress, interconnect and licensing together — so the architecture you sign off is the one that actually costs least over five years.
Which cross-cloud Oracle architectures create the worst cost traps?
Some patterns are predictable money pits. The most expensive, in rough order, are: continuous cross-cloud Data Guard or GoldenGate replication; analytics or reporting tiers querying a database that lives in a different cloud; cross-cloud backup and recovery, where full and incremental backups stream out of the source provider on a schedule; and "split-brain" application stacks where the app server and database sit in different clouds and chatter constantly over a billed link.
Each of these is defensible in isolation and dangerous in combination. A single estate that replicates cross-cloud, backs up cross-cloud, and serves analytics cross-cloud is paying egress three times on overlapping data. The discipline is to map every data flow that crosses a cloud boundary, attach a volume and a rate to it, and challenge each one: does this workload need to be in a different cloud at all, or is it there because of an org-chart decision rather than an architecture decision?
An energy company migrating from on-premise Oracle Database to OCI initially planned a cross-cloud standby that would have shipped redo over metered internet egress. Our advisors re-routed replication onto a dedicated interconnect and co-located the analytics tier with the primary, protecting the BYOL savings the migration was built to capture. See our Energy OCI Cloud Migration case study for the full breakdown.
How do you right-size Oracle data movement to cut egress costs?
The levers are concrete and additive. Co-locate the database and its heaviest consumers in the same cloud and region so the chattiest traffic never crosses a billed boundary. Route any unavoidable cross-cloud replication over a dedicated interconnect rather than the public internet. Compress redo and backup streams — Oracle's Advanced Compression and RMAN compression reduce the bytes on the wire, though Advanced Compression is itself a licensed option to confirm. Keep backups in the same provider as the primary. And reserve cross-cloud resilience for the databases whose recovery objectives genuinely require it.
Above all, treat egress as a first-class number in the business case. A buyer-side architecture review prices each data flow before commitment and pressure-tests the resilience design against its true running cost. For the wider cross-cloud licensing picture, see our Oracle licensing in multi-cloud analysis and the provider-specific Oracle@Hyperscaler egress breakdown, and ground database options in the Oracle Database Licensing Guide. When the design touches your back catalogue of entitlements, start at the Oracle Licensing Experts home page or talk to us directly via contact.
Frequently Asked Questions: Oracle Cloud Egress & Interconnect
How much does Oracle cloud egress cost?
Egress is billed per gigabyte leaving a cloud provider's network. Typical 2026 list rates are roughly $0.09/GB on AWS, $0.087/GB on Azure and $0.12/GB on Google Cloud after small free tiers, while OCI offers 10 TB of free monthly egress then about $0.0085/GB. For chatty Oracle workloads, those cents per gigabyte compound into six-figure annual bills.
Does Oracle charge a separate license fee for cross-cloud data transfer?
No. Oracle does not levy a license fee on egress itself — egress and interconnect charges are billed by the cloud providers, not Oracle. The licensing trap is indirect: replication features such as Data Guard, Active Data Guard and GoldenGate are separately licensed Oracle options, and the architectures that justify them are also the ones that generate the heaviest egress.
Is OCI to Azure interconnect traffic free?
The OCI–Azure Interconnect removes the per-gigabyte data-transfer charge over the dedicated FastConnect/ExpressRoute path in supported paired regions, but it is not cost-free. You still pay for the FastConnect and ExpressRoute circuit ports, any partner connectivity, and egress on traffic that leaves either cloud by other paths. Budget for the circuits, not just the data.
How do egress costs affect Oracle BYOL savings?
BYOL reduces Oracle license-included compute cost, but it does nothing for data-movement cost. When an Oracle estate is split across clouds for BYOL or resilience reasons, cross-cloud egress and interconnect frequently claw back 12–28% of the modeled three-year saving (Oracle Licensing Experts benchmark, 2026). Egress must be modeled alongside licensing, not after.
Which Oracle architecture generates the most egress?
Cross-cloud Data Guard and GoldenGate replication generate the most egress because every committed change is shipped continuously to a standby or target in another provider's network. A high-transaction database can move terabytes per day, and every gigabyte that crosses the cloud boundary is billed at the source provider's egress rate.
How can you reduce Oracle cloud egress costs?
Co-locate the database and its heaviest consumers in the same cloud and region, route replication over a dedicated interconnect rather than the public internet, compress redo and backup streams, keep backups in the same provider as the primary, and right-size which workloads truly need cross-cloud resilience. A buyer-side architecture review models each lever before commitment.