Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

dansdatathoughts.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 183 posts

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#121

Post by eastdakota »

12907835202 wrote: post #109
stingraycharles wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, 1 million downloads @ 1GB is a lot of data transfer. CloudFlare is likely losing money on this.

I'm abusing the hell out of it right now offering GB+ downloads that I used to use Digital Ocean Spaces for. It's saving me $2000-3000 a month since the switch. Maybe abuse isn't the right word but definitely making the most. I am a bit scared about being turned off overnight though.

Not abuse. Thanks for being a customer. Bandwidth at scale is effectively free.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#122

Post by eastdakota »

qaq wrote: post #116
stingraycharles wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But their egress capacity is limited, not? We're talking about 1PB per month here. If every customer of them would be paying only 13 cents a month and pushing out 1PB per month, wouldn't they need to significantly upgrade their hardware and lose money in the process?

They are already serving roughly 20% of internet traffic as is so there is some natural limit to this whole thing.

Yup. Bandwidth at scale is effectively free.

The greatest trick AWS ever pulled was convincing the world you needed to pay for bandwidth.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#123

Post by eastdakota »

gurchik wrote: post #64
meowface wrote: post #23

Is there any reason to not use R2 over a competing storage service? I already use Cloudflare for lots of other things, and don't personally care all that much about the "Cloudflare's near-monopoly as a web intermediary is dangerous" arguments or anything like that.

1. This is the most obvious one, but S3 access control is done via IAM. For better or for worse, IAM has a lot of functionality. I can configure a specific EC2 instance to have access to a specific file in S3 without the need to deal with API keys and such. I can search CloudTrail for all the times a specific user read a certain file. 2. R2 doesn't support file versioning like S3. As I understand it, Wasabi supports…

Thank you for providing product roadmap. Label all the above: coming soon.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#124

Post by up2isomorphism »

The problem here is as long as cloud services are sticky, moving your data doesn’t really solve the vendor locking, egress is just one way to leverage that characteristic, I can easily come up with another ten way to charge you as long as you can’t not easily migrate your stacks off a cloud platform.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#125

Post by technion »

gurchik wrote: post #64
meowface wrote: post #23

Is there any reason to not use R2 over a competing storage service? I already use Cloudflare for lots of other things, and don't personally care all that much about the "Cloudflare's near-monopoly as a web intermediary is dangerous" arguments or anything like that.

1. This is the most obvious one, but S3 access control is done via IAM. For better or for worse, IAM has a lot of functionality. I can configure a specific EC2 instance to have access to a specific file in S3 without the need to deal with API keys and such. I can search CloudTrail for all the times a specific user read a certain file. 2. R2 doesn't support file versioning like S3. As I understand it, Wasabi supports…

I'm happy to be told to look harder but I couldn't find an R2 Object Lock equivalent.

I do have to wonder if that leaves R2 customers one minor compromise away from losing their whole data store.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#126

Post by 55555 »

eastdakota wrote: post #122
qaq wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are already serving roughly 20% of internet traffic as is so there is some natural limit to this whole thing.

Yup. Bandwidth at scale is effectively free. The greatest trick AWS ever pulled was convincing the world you needed to pay for bandwidth.

Well you’ve won me over.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#127

Post by Too »

stingraycharles wrote: post #103
josevalerio wrote: post #80

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

To be fair, 1 million downloads @ 1GB is a lot of data transfer. CloudFlare is likely losing money on this.

One hour 4K Netflix episode would be around 1Gb magnitude and likely watched by even more than 1M ppl. Game downloads even bigger, often at several Gb, with similar amount of users.

Though not everyone is Netflix.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#128

Post by thrtythreeforty »

Hasz wrote: post #63
meowface wrote: post #23

Is there any reason to not use R2 over a competing storage service? I already use Cloudflare for lots of other things, and don't personally care all that much about the "Cloudflare's near-monopoly as a web intermediary is dangerous" arguments or anything like that.

As far as I know, R2 offers no storage tiers. Most of my s3 usage is archival and sits in glacier. From Cloudflare's pricing page, S3 is substantially cheaper for that type of workload.

I know people archive all kinds of data. I use Glacier as off-site backup for my measly 1TB of irreplaceable data. But I know many customers put petabytes in it.

What could you have a petabyte of that you're pretty sure you'll never need again? What kind of datasets are you storing?

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#129

Post by Too »

meowface wrote: post #23

Is there any reason to not use R2 over a competing storage service? I already use Cloudflare for lots of other things, and don't personally care all that much about the "Cloudflare's near-monopoly as a web intermediary is dangerous" arguments or anything like that.

For data not frequently egressed. Log storage for example, data locality will be better and you will only ever extract small % of logs stored.

Same with data that is aggregated into smaller data set within AWS before you egress it.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#130

Post by kbumsik »

There are some dealbreakers to me.

1. No Object history and locking. So there is absolutely no way to recover files when you do any kinds of mistakes.

2. No object tiering and storage is not that cheap. Although R2 egress is free, R2 is only 35% cheaper than S3 in terms of storage, but it is not cheaper than other alternatives. Furthermore, R2 is a lot more expensive than S3 infrequent/cold tier.

For example, Backblaze B2 is 4 times cheaper than S3, and B2 offers history/locking. When B2 egress is free up to 3x monthly storage, B2 is much better option than R2 for most cases if a considerably high egress is not needed.

Post reply on HN