11–20 of 183 posts
Cloudflare has been building a micro-AWS/Vercel competitor and I love it; i.e., serverless functions, queues, sqlite, kv store, object store (R2), etc.
FWIW, Vercel is at least partially backed by cloudflare services under the hood.
AWS has zero interest in S3’s API being a universal standard for blob storage and you can tell from its design. What happens in practice is that everybody (including R2) implements some subset of the S3 API, so everyone ends up with a jagged API surface where developers can use a standard API library but then have to refer to docs of each S3-compatible vendor to see figure out whether the subset of the S3 API you need will be compatible with different vendors.
This makes it harder than it needs to be to make vendor-agnostic open source projects that are backed by blob storage, which would otherwise be an excellent lowest-common-denominator storage option.
Blob storage is the most underused cloud tech IMHO largely because of the lack of a standard blob storage API. Cloudflare is in the rare position where you have a fantastic S3 alternative that people love, and you would be doing the industry a huge service by standardizing the API.
Cloudflare has been attacking the S3 egress problem by creating Sippy: https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/data-migration/sippy/ It allows you to incrementally migrate off of providers like S3 and onto the egress-free Cloudflare R2. Very clever idea. He calls R2 an undiscovered gem and IMO this is the gem's undiscovered gem. (Understandable since Sippy is very new and still in beta)
What are the economics that Amazon and other providers have egress fees and R2 doesn't? Is it acting as a loss leader or does this model still make money for CloudFlare?
Cloudflare has huge ingress, because they need it to protect sites against DDOS.
They basically already pay for their R2 bandwidth ( = egress) because of that.
Additionally, with their SDN ( software defined networking) they can fine-tune some of the Data-Flow/bandwidth too.
That's how I understood it, fyi.
Some more info could be found when they started ( or co-founded, not sure) the bandwidth alliance.
Eg.
The real issue is how that data get's into S3 in the first place and what else you need to do with it.
S3 and DynamoDB are the real moats for AWS.
If you are having lots of egress: R2 is the cheapest (15$/TB/month, free egress)
R2 can get somewhat expensive if you have lots of mutations, which is not a typical use case for most.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the economics that Amazon and other providers have egress fees and R2 doesn't? Is it acting as a loss leader or does this model still make money for CloudFlare?
You pay for the capacity of your network. Cloudflare has huge ingress, because they need it to protect sites against DDOS. They basically already pay for their R2 bandwidth ( = egress) because of that. Additionally, with their SDN ( software defined networking) they can fine-tune some of the Data-Flow/bandwidth too. That's how I understood it, fyi. Some more info could be found when they started ( or co-founded, not…
Since I know there will be Cloudflare people reading this (hi!), I'm begging you: please wrestle control of the blob storage API standard from AWS. AWS has zero interest in S3’s API being a universal standard for blob storage and you can tell from its design. What happens in practice is that everybody (including R2) implements some subset of the S3 API, so everyone ends up with a jagged API surface where developers c…
For example, "Can one append to an existing blob/resume an upload?" leads to lots of questions about data immutability, cacheability of blobs, etc.
"What happens if two things are uploaded with the same name at the same time" leads into data models, mastership/eventual consistency, etc.
Basically, these 'little' differences are in fact huge differences on the inside, and fixing them probably involves a total redesign.
Cloudflare has been attacking the S3 egress problem by creating Sippy: https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/data-migration/sippy/ It allows you to incrementally migrate off of providers like S3 and onto the egress-free Cloudflare R2. Very clever idea. He calls R2 an undiscovered gem and IMO this is the gem's undiscovered gem. (Understandable since Sippy is very new and still in beta)
What are the economics that Amazon and other providers have egress fees and R2 doesn't? Is it acting as a loss leader or does this model still make money for CloudFlare?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You pay for the capacity of your network. Cloudflare has huge ingress, because they need it to protect sites against DDOS. They basically already pay for their R2 bandwidth ( = egress) because of that. Additionally, with their SDN ( software defined networking) they can fine-tune some of the Data-Flow/bandwidth too. That's how I understood it, fyi. Some more info could be found when they started ( or co-founded, not…
Also, for the CDN case that R2 seems to be targeting - regardless of the origin of the data (R2 or S3), chances are pretty good that Cloudflare is already paying for the egress anyway.
A CDN keeps the data nearby, reducing the need to pay egress to the big bandwidth providers.
( not an expert though)
Cloudflare has been attacking the S3 egress problem by creating Sippy: https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/data-migration/sippy/ It allows you to incrementally migrate off of providers like S3 and onto the egress-free Cloudflare R2. Very clever idea. He calls R2 an undiscovered gem and IMO this is the gem's undiscovered gem. (Understandable since Sippy is very new and still in beta)
What are the economics that Amazon and other providers have egress fees and R2 doesn't? Is it acting as a loss leader or does this model still make money for CloudFlare?