97 articles on networking — what drives the cost, how it is priced, and where the savings actually are.
A cloud load balancer bills for an hourly rate plus a capacity or data-processing unit, so cost scales with both uptime and traffic. Here is how load balancer pricing works across AWS, GCP, and Azure, and how to keep it low.
Data transfer out, egress to the internet, is one of the least understood and most surprising cloud charges. Inbound is usually free, outbound is not, and it scales with traffic and region. Here is how egress pricing works and how to cut it.
AWS Direct Connect gives a dedicated private link with lower, predictable data-transfer rates but port and setup costs. A Site-to-Site VPN is cheap to start but runs over the internet at standard egress rates. Here is the cost comparison.
The VPC itself is free, and so are subnets, route tables, security groups, and internet gateways. The costs come from what you attach: NAT gateways, VPC endpoints, data transfer, and traffic through certain components. Here is exactly what you pay for.
Google Cloud prices the same resources differently by Region, sometimes by 20 percent or more, and egress between Regions and to the internet varies too. Here is how GCP Region pricing works and how to pick Regions that balance cost, latency, and compliance.
NAT gateways charge both an hourly fee and a per-GB data processing fee, so a chatty private subnet can rack up a large bill nobody expected. Here is why it happens and how to cut the cost.
AWS PrivateLink gives private, secure access to services without traversing the public internet, but interface endpoints bill an hourly fee per endpoint per AZ plus a per-GB data processing charge. Here is how the cost works and when it pays off.
Traffic Manager bills per million DNS queries plus a monthly fee per monitored endpoint, with external endpoints costing more to check. It is a cheap DNS-based global router. Here is how it prices and where cost hides with many endpoints.
Azure Standard Load Balancer bills per load-balancing rule and per GB of data processed, plus outbound. The Basic tier is free but limited and retiring. Here is how the Standard tier prices and how to keep it lean.
Azure VPN Gateway bills a fixed hourly fee by SKU (from about $0.19/hour for VpnGw1 to several dollars for higher SKUs) plus outbound data transfer. The SKU, chosen for throughput and tunnels, dominates the bill. Here is how to size it.
A CDN's cost hinges on cache hit ratio: cache hits serve from the edge cheaply, while misses hit your origin, incurring origin egress and compute. Raising the hit ratio cuts both CDN and origin cost. Here is how.
Edge compute (Cloudflare Workers, Lambda@Edge, and others) runs code at CDN edge locations, priced by requests and compute time, often cheaply. It cuts origin load and latency but has constraints. Here is the cost model.
Managed DNS (Route 53, Azure DNS, Cloud DNS) prices by hosted zones plus queries, all inexpensive, with health checks and traffic policies adding cost. The cheapest is usually the one native to your cloud. This compares them.
NAT gateways bill an hourly fee plus per-GB data processing, so high-traffic private subnets accessing the internet or AWS services rack up processing charges. VPC endpoints, consolidation, and architecture cut it. Here is how.
Site-to-site VPN bills per connection-hour plus data; Transit Gateway bills per attachment-hour plus data processing but scales to many networks cleanly. For a few connections VPN is cheaper; for many, Transit Gateway wins. Here is the tradeoff.
PrivateLink (and Private Endpoints) provide private connectivity to services without traversing the internet, billing per endpoint-hour plus data processed. It improves security and can reduce egress, but endpoints add up. Here is the model.
A service mesh (Istio, Linkerd, and others) adds a control plane plus per-pod sidecar proxies that consume CPU and memory, so the cost is that overhead across your fleet. Lightweight meshes and sidecar-less modes cut it. Here is the model.
AWS Global Accelerator bills a fixed hourly fee plus a premium per-GB data transfer charge, routing user traffic over the AWS backbone for better performance. For latency-sensitive global apps it helps, but the premium adds up. Here is the model.
Connecting workloads across clouds means egress on both sides plus interconnect or VPN cost, so data moving between clouds is billed twice and adds latency. Minimizing cross-cloud data movement is the main lever. Here is how.
Bandwidth (data transfer) cost spans egress, cross-region, cross-AZ, and CDN transfer, and it hides across many services. Compression, caching, CDNs, in-region traffic, and committed transfer pricing cut it. Here is a complete playbook.
A VPC itself is free, but its components, NAT gateways, VPC endpoints, data transfer, and traffic mirroring, carry cost. Knowing which pieces bill, and optimizing them, keeps VPC networking cheap. Here is the breakdown.
Network topology, hub-and-spoke, mesh, flat, or segmented, determines data transfer paths and connectivity cost. A well-designed topology keeps traffic cheap and manageable; a poor one multiplies transfer and complexity. Here is how to design for cost.
Egress, data leaving a cloud to the internet or across regions, is billed per GB and is one of the most underestimated cloud costs. Architecture, caching, and keeping traffic in-region cut it. Here is how.
ExpressRoute bills a circuit port fee by bandwidth, in a metered plan (per-GB egress) or unlimited plan (flat, higher fee), plus provider connectivity charges. For large, steady traffic to Azure it can beat VPN. Here is the model.