From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity • Hacker News Board

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#31

Post by johnjohnnotjohn » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 8:36 PM UTC

ravetcofx wrote: post #9

simonsarris wrote: post #2

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?

I’m inherently suspicious of services that are free (like Cloudflare egress). Maybe I’ve been burned too many times over the years, but I almost expect some kind of hostility or u-turn in the long run (I do really like Cloudflare’s products right now!).

I almost wish they had some kind of sustainable usage-based charge that was much lower than AWS.

Feel free to tell me why I’m wrong! I’d love to jump onboard - it just seems too good to be true in the long-term.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#32

Post by swyx » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 8:37 PM UTC

NicoJuicy wrote: post #13

ravetcofx wrote: post #9

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…

somebody more knowledgeaeble please correct me if i'm mistaken, but i think the bandwidth alliance is really the lynchpin of the whole thing. basically get all the non-AWS players in the room and agree on zero rating traffic between each other, to provide a credible alternative to AWS networks

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#33

Post by chatmasta » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 8:37 PM UTC

threatofrain wrote: post #4

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.

Vercel doesn't offer any of that, without major caveats (e.g. must use Next.js to get a serverless endpoint). And to the degree they do offer any of it, it's mostly built on infrastructure of other companies, including Cloudflare.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#34

Post by oaktowner » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 8:37 PM UTC

kazen44 wrote: post #26

ravetcofx wrote: post #9

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?

also, egress fees are a sort of vendor lock-in, because getting data out of the cloud is vastly more expensive then putting new data into the cloud..

Exactly this. Data has gravity, and this increases the gravity around data stored at Amazon...making it more likely for you to buy more compute/services at Amazon.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#35

Post by maccam912 » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 8:38 PM UTC

vladvasiliu wrote: post #24

tehlike wrote: post #15

If you are storing large amount of data: E2 is the cheapest (20$/TB/year, 3x egress for free) If you are having lots of egress: R2 is the cheapest (15$/TB/month, free egress) R2 can get somewhat expensive if you have lots of mutations, which is not a typical use case for most.

What's E2? Top google result for "e2 blob storage" is azure, but that can't be it since the pricing table comes at around $18/TB/month.

I imagine it was a typo for backblaze B2? The call out that egress is free for the first 3x of what you have stored matches up.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#36

Post by hipadev23 » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 8:39 PM UTC

OP is missing that a correct implementation of Databricks or Snowflake will have those instances are running inside the same AWS region as the data. That's not to say R2 isn't an amazing product, but the egregious costs aren't as high since egress is $0 on both sides.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#37

Post by natrys » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 8:41 PM UTC

vladvasiliu wrote: post #24

tehlike wrote: post #15

If you are storing large amount of data: E2 is the cheapest (20$/TB/year, 3x egress for free) If you are having lots of egress: R2 is the cheapest (15$/TB/month, free egress) R2 can get somewhat expensive if you have lots of mutations, which is not a typical use case for most.

What's E2? Top google result for "e2 blob storage" is azure, but that can't be it since the pricing table comes at around $18/TB/month.

Seems to be this one: https://www.idrive.com/object-storage-e2/

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#38

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 8:42 PM UTC

vladvasiliu wrote: post #24

tehlike wrote: post #15

If you are storing large amount of data: E2 is the cheapest (20$/TB/year, 3x egress for free) If you are having lots of egress: R2 is the cheapest (15$/TB/month, free egress) R2 can get somewhat expensive if you have lots of mutations, which is not a typical use case for most.

What's E2? Top google result for "e2 blob storage" is azure, but that can't be it since the pricing table comes at around $18/TB/month.

[deleted]

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#39

Post by WJW » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 8:43 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #18

ravetcofx wrote: post #9

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?

Completely free egress is a loss leader, but the true cost is so little (at least 90x less than what AWS charges) that it pays for itself in the form of more CloudFlare marketshare/mindshare.

I know from personal experience that "big" customers can negotiate incredible discounts on egress bandwidth as well. 90-95% discount is not impossible, only "retail" customers pay the sticker price.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#40

Post by specialp » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 8:44 PM UTC

chatmasta wrote: post #30

ravetcofx wrote: post #9

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?

Amazon doesn't have unit cost for egress. They charge you for the stuff you put through their pipe, while paying their transit providers only for the size of the pipe (or more often, not paying them anything since they just peer directly with them at an exchange point). Amazon uses $/gb as a price gouging mechanism and also a QoS constraint. Every bit you send through their pipe is basically printing money for them,…

You don't get charge for transit if you are sending stuff IN from the internet or to any other AWS resource in that region. So there is no QOS constraint inside except for perhaps paying for the S3 GET/SELECT/LIST costs.

It is pretty much exclusively to lock you into their services. It heavily impacts multi-cloud and outside of AWS service decisions when your data lives in AWS and is taxed at 5-9 cents a GB to come out. We have settled for inferior AWS solutions at times because the cost of moving things out is prohibitive (IE AWS Backup vs other providers)