As of last year, GCE decided to charge for egress, when reading from a multi-regional (MR) bucket [1]. AWS' s3 doesn't even support multi-regional buckets. (Technically, it supports cross-regional replication, but the bucket is always pinned to a specific region.) In light of the above, we are going to stick with regional buckets for roachtest, across all providers. The reduction in egress (cost) also facilitates better resource load-balancing across regions; e.g., our local SSD quota has been steadily running low in us-east1, while the request to increase it, continues to linger; moving a small percentage of clusters to us-central1 alleviates the quota issue.

[1]https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing-announce#network

Jira issue: CRDB-31875