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

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#71

Post by martinald » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 9:50 PM UTC

specialp wrote: post #40

chatmasta wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

It also makes things like just using RDS for your managed database and having compute nearby but with another provider often incredibly expensive.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#72

Post by martinald » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 9:51 PM UTC

WJW wrote: post #39

Nextgrid wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's still a 3-10x markup though. And it's also very dependent on your relationship with AWS. What happens if they don't offer the discount on renewal?

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#73

Post by 9dev » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 10:01 PM UTC

nik736 wrote: post #3

S3 and R2 aside, OVHs object storage offering is really robust and great. It performs better than S3 and is way cheaper, in storage and egress cost.

You might even say their offering is… on fire

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#74

Post by hipadev23 » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 10:02 PM UTC

cmgriffing wrote: post #57

hipadev23 wrote: post #36

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.

I could be mistaken, but I believe AWS would still charge for one direction of an S3 to Databricks/Snowflake instance/cluster.

AWS S3 Egress charges are $0.00 when the destination is AWS within the same region. When you setup your Databricks or Snowflake accounts, you need to correctly specify the same region as your S3 bucket(s) otherwise you'll pay egress.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#75

Post by slig » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 10:42 PM UTC

andrewstuart wrote: post #62

arghwhat wrote: post #21

I wish the R2 access control was similar to S3 - able to issue keys with specific accesses to particular prefixes, and ability to delegate ability to create keys. It currently feels a little limited and… bolted on to the Cloudflare UI.

I think the idea is to use Cloudflare Workers to add more sophisticated functionality.

But then you start paying for Worker's bandwidth, correct?

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#76

Post by gen220 » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 10:42 PM UTC

thedaly wrote: post #28

> In fact, there’s an opportunity to build entire companies that take advantage of this price differential and I expect we’ll see more and more of that happening. Interesting. What sort of companies can take advantage of this?

I'm building a "media hosting site". Based on somewhat reasonable forecasts of egress demand vs total volume stored, using R2 means I'll be able to charge a low take rate that should (in theory) give me a good counterposition to competitors in the space.

Basically, using R2 allows you to undercut competitors' pricing. It also means I don't need to build out a separate CDN to host my files, because Cloudflare will do that for me, too.

Competitors built out and maintain their own equivalent CDNs and storage solutions that are more ~10x more expensive to maintain and operate than going through Cloudflare. Basically, Cloudflare is doing to CDNs and storage what AWS and friends did to compute.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#77

Post by jmarbach » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 10:43 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?

Cloudflare wrote a blog post about their bandwidth egress charges in different parts of the world: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a...

The original post also includes a link to a more recent Cloudflare blog post on AWS bandwidth charges: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#78

Post by gen220 » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 10:49 PM UTC

jokethrowaway wrote: post #45

It blows my mind that anyone would consider S3 cheap. You always had available plenty of space on dedicated servers for way cheaper before the cloud. You could make an argument about the API being nicer than dealing with a linux server - but is AWS nice? I think it's pretty awful and requires tons of (different, specific, non transferable) knowledge. Hype, scalability buzzwords thrown around by startups with 1000 use…

I think it all depends on the volume of data you're storing, access requirements, and how much value you plan to generate per GB.

It's certainly quite cheap for a set of typical "requirements" for media hosting companies.

But yeah, if you're storing data for mainly archival purposes, you shouldn't be paying for R2 or S3.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#79

Post by hipadev23 » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 10:52 PM UTC

dangoldin wrote: post #55

hipadev23 wrote: post #36

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.

Author here and it is true that costs within a region are free and if you do design your system appropriately you can take advantage of it but I've seen accidental cases where someone will try to access in another region and it's nice to not even have to worry about it. Even that can be handled with better tooling/processes but the bigger point is if you want to have your data be available across clouds to take advan…

Yeah, for greenfield work building up on R2 is generally a far better deal than S3, but if you have a massive amount of data already on S3, especially if it's small files, you're going to pay a massive penalty to move the data. Sippy is nice but it just spreads the pain over time.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#80

Post by josevalerio » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 11:08 PM UTC

Here’s a tweet from Corey Quinn describing how bonkers R2 pricing is:

> let’s remember that the internet is 1-to-many. If 1 million people download that 1GB this month, my cost with @cloudflare R2 this way rounds up to 13¢. With @awscloud S3 it’s $59,247.52.

https://x.com/quinnypig/status/1443076111651401731?s=46