Egress costs refer to the fees incurred when data transfers out of a cloud provider’s storage to another location. For example, to a user’s browser or a processing server. When using Encord, egress costs arise when media files are accessed for annotation, display, or computation.
To minimize these costs, Encord optimizes data transfers by:
- Allowing users to register media with metadata and embeddings, avoiding unnecessary file ingestion.
- Performing searches on metadata instead of the actual media files.
- Streaming only the visible portions of videos and thumbnails.
- Utilizing local caching to prevent repeated data transfers during annotation.
Local caching prevents repeated egress costs when revisiting the same section of a video during annotation.
| Scenario | Egress Cost Impact |
|---|
| Data Registration | No egress cost if users provide media metadata and embeddings, as files are not ingested. If metadata is not provided then Encord downloads the data once for processing. |
| Searching | Searches are performed on metadata stored in Encord’s servers, incurring no egress cost. |
| Search Results | Data is streamed only for thumbnails in view; for videos, only visible frames are loaded. |
| Video Annotation | Egress costs apply only to the section of the video being viewed/annotated, with some buffering allowance. Local caching prevents repeated egress costs when revisiting the same section. |
| Index/Active Display | Minimal egress cost, as filtering is based on precomputed metrics/embeddings. |
| Visual Curation in Active | Small data transfer since only selected frames are displayed. |
| Metric/Embedding Computation | If processed on Encord’s side, egress cost equals the data size. Needs confirmation on frame ingestion. No egress cost if users provide media metadata and embeddings. |
| Cost | 1GB of 1080p footage costs ~$0.10 in egress. |
