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From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

dansdatathoughts.substack.com

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Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#131

Post by supriyo-biswas »

johnklos wrote: post #52

Should we simply ignore the tremendous amount of phishing hosted using r2.dev? Or is this also part of "an economic opportunity"? Cloudflare may well be on their way to becoming a monopoly, but they certainly show they don't care about abuse. Even if it weren't a simple matter of principle, in case they aren't successful in forcing themselves down everyone's throats, I wouldn't want to host anything on any service th…

I’ve seen lots of phishing websites hosted on S3, with responses from AWS coming weeks late.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#132

Post by inhumantsar »

Too wrote: post #127
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.

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.

Almost no one is

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#133

Post by mannyv »

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?

The way to reduce s3 egress fees is to use CloudFront, negotiate your cloudfront fees down, then use s3 as the origin.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#134

Post by tlarkworthy »

I did some like-for-like comparisons across S3 vendors. S3 perf is way better than the challengers, R2 is the worst performer. Also it doesn't support concurrency on list operations, or object versions. So it's a bit more complex than "R2 is best coz it's cheapest" it's not super optimized yet

https://twitter.com/tomlarkworthy/status/1711846776905293967...

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#135

Post by weird-eye-issue »

stingraycharles wrote: post #115
pier25 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they? Cloudflare doesn't pay for egress and neither does AWS.

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?

"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?"

Yes, but every customer would never do this, so what is your point?

You have to think more in terms of averages for things like this

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#136

Post by zmmmmm »

But what are you going to do with your data in R2? They don't have all the other cloud services to use the data. Unless your only use of the cloud is literally for raw storage, it's not that practical.

Compare with say Oracle cloud which tries to compete by having 1/10th the egress charge. But nobody uses it anyway and they DO offer all the other services.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#137

Post by weird-eye-issue »

zmmmmm wrote: post #136

But what are you going to do with your data in R2? They don't have all the other cloud services to use the data. Unless your only use of the cloud is literally for raw storage, it's not that practical. Compare with say Oracle cloud which tries to compete by having 1/10th the egress charge. But nobody uses it anyway and they DO offer all the other services.

Yeah if you want to completely ignore Cloudflare Workers, Durable Objects, etc then that comparison makes sense I guess... but wait that is only if you also wanted to ignore that you can serve the files publicly directly so that alone has many use cases as well esp with the free bandwidth

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#138

Post by andrewstuart »

zmmmmm wrote: post #136

But what are you going to do with your data in R2? They don't have all the other cloud services to use the data. Unless your only use of the cloud is literally for raw storage, it's not that practical. Compare with say Oracle cloud which tries to compete by having 1/10th the egress charge. But nobody uses it anyway and they DO offer all the other services.

You could use a computer to access your R2 files - a computer from anywhere on the Internet.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#139

Post by ddorian43 »

gen220 wrote: post #76
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…

Your competitors can do the same thing though?

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#140

Post by arghwhat »

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 I’m forced to write server code where previously I needed none.
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