> And no they didnt disrupted anything. You dont disrupt anything in one week actually. Has R2 had any impact on S3 business model or customers so far ? Probably not. Cloud egress costs are the primary lock-in mechanism for cloud providers and that's been recognized as such for many years. This isn't the kind of thing which changes an industry in less than a week but I doubt you will want to defend this claim a year…
Cloudflare has always had free bandwidth and you can point the origin to whatever you want, including Backblaze which has free interconnect and cheaper pricing.
> Cloudflare has always had free bandwidth
Only for HTML content. [1] That is the real disruption here.
Cloudflare is a service provider the site owner contracts with too, so why the distinction?
Because math doesn't break like contracts do mainly.
that doesn't address my point, since you can say the exact same about wherever the site is hosted unless you strictly self-host everything, which the vast majority of sites doesn't do.
R2's final pricing isn't yet announced, but my understanding of the quoted section is that R2 will charge for storage operations (API calls), what S3 calls "Requests & data retrievals" on their pricing page [0]. But _egress_ (bandwidth) fees, which can be the most costly component of an S3 bill, are totally eliminated. S3 — Charges for amount of data resident on disk, amount of data retrieved, and each API call R2 —…
I can't wait to read the small print when it comes to actual egress bandwidth pricing. I can't believe it's going to actually cost zero dollars for all use-cases.
I see Cloudflare as part of the system of control of the internet. They can prevent sites from being seen or users from accessing the internet. I also suspect that their business model is the mafia protection racket - that they may run some of the bots that commit DDOS attacks - it would be in their business interests.
Why is this downvoted? I understand the second paragraph might be slightly aggressive/inflammatory but the first paragraph alone is a legitimate critique. I would really appreciate if those who disagree would provide counter arguments, as both sides here offer the potential for an interesting (and important) dialogue about CF and their role in global Internet/WWW infrastructure.
Thank you. I appreciate you saying that the second paragraph is aggressive, but I think it would be naive to think that it isn't possible, or even probable - if there's money in play.
A lot of anti-virus protection companies did do exactly this - create the viruses that made their products sell. Its really not without precedent.
The big question I have regarding R2 (for those no in the lops: Cloudflare's alternative to S3 with no egress fees (!)) is if the terms hold if you choose to use it to host video. If yes, then wow, this truly is disruptive.
> if the terms hold if you choose to use it to host video
Pretty damn disingenuous if the terms don't hold based on type of content. There's no such caveat mentioned.
Cloudflare really is impressive. Who can forget when they disrupted the retro emulation scene, by protecting the website that drove a prominent emulation developer to suicide? Or when they disrupted Isla Vista by serving the sites where Elliot Rodger was radicalized?
One thing that concerned me is that CF kicked a few "bad actors" off their network
One could argue that they have the right and/or duty to do that, but being closer and closer to a "internet backbone" provider, this can become scary.
Would you like water to be cut off to "bad actors"?
I know that Cloudflare is always very liked on HN and the CTO often comments here. I often refer to friends that Cloudflare only exists thanks to HN. But Cloudflare is not (neither HN) the center of the world you could have better than R2 with B2 before for example. And no they didnt disrupted anything. You dont disrupt anything in one week actually. Has R2 had any impact on S3 business model or customers so far ? Pr…
> I believe it is one of the few (maybe with Stripe) that is able to still work as a startup even though they have thousands of employees, which is quite impressive.
You wouldn't call it impressive if you had to wait >24h for a support response as a user with an enterprise package. I'd call it quite the opposite from my experience with them at my previous job.
I see Cloudflare as part of the system of control of the internet. They can prevent sites from being seen or users from accessing the internet. I also suspect that their business model is the mafia protection racket - that they may run some of the bots that commit DDOS attacks - it would be in their business interests.
Why is this downvoted? I understand the second paragraph might be slightly aggressive/inflammatory but the first paragraph alone is a legitimate critique. I would really appreciate if those who disagree would provide counter arguments, as both sides here offer the potential for an interesting (and important) dialogue about CF and their role in global Internet/WWW infrastructure.
"What may be asserted without evidence, may be dismissed without evidence". If someone is going to make the claim that Cloudflare is running an illegal protection racket and funds DDOS attacks against their customer's websites, then the burden of proof is on them to substantiate that claim. Otherwise, it's just pointless bad-faith remarks. And we can't just take the first paragraph in isolation—it depends on the second paragraph for logical support. How could Cloudflare prevent any non-Cloudflare site from being seen, or prevent any non-Cloudflare users from accessing the internet? There is no requirement that anyone use Cloudflare—they just happen to be the best game in town. If you believe otherwise, you have to assert arguments that support your position, you can't just state your thesis and expect people to guess what your reasoning is.
I know that Cloudflare is always very liked on HN and the CTO often comments here. I often refer to friends that Cloudflare only exists thanks to HN. But Cloudflare is not (neither HN) the center of the world you could have better than R2 with B2 before for example. And no they didnt disrupted anything. You dont disrupt anything in one week actually. Has R2 had any impact on S3 business model or customers so far ? Pr…
Agree obviously but I think the message is conveyed about what is interesting. They are competing everywhere CDN, Zero Trust / EdgeSec, Edge Computing, Hosting, etc... Anyone can think of any good historical good case studies on companies doing this in the past? Like becoming oversaturated, not focusing on one thing enough, or just growing like wild fire across spaces?
They seem to be massively diving into anything that can be computed/stored on the edge, and/or can benefit from a high performance network behind that edge. Which makes sense.
Also, they make quite smart choices. An example of one very smart choice is that they don't do Docker for cloud computation, only Javascript/WebASM, and that means they can spin up code in Isolates in V8 that's much more lightweight than having all the infra needed to do Docker.