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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

#141
post #56

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,…

Honest question, how is this different than a toll road? An entity creates a road network with a certain size (lanes, capacity/hour, literal traffic) and pays for it by charging individual cars put through the road.

The toll road is the only way out of the county and it's charging $90. That's what's different.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#142

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, Backbla…

I'm curious how the performance compares these days.

The last time I benchmarked B2 was years ago but it wasn't as reliable as I wanted at getting me files in under two seconds.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#144
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about R2 specifically, but we migrated one of our service from S3 to Cloudflare Images, and we have been hit with over 40h+ of down time on CF's side over the last 30 days. One of the outage was 22 hours long. Today's outage has been ongoing for almost 12 hours and is still ongoing, and we have had 2 or 3 others >1h outages. Every cloud provider has outages sometimes but CF has been horrendous. We were a…

I don’t know why this isn’t mentioned more. CF offering (R2/workers/pages) are extremely unreliable that I’m wondering if anyone is actually using them.

We are using Workers for ~12mo now with actually very little actual downtime. There have been some regional issues but no world wide outages.

That said we don't use any queues, KV, etc. Just pure JS isolates so that probably contributes to the robustness.

We do use the Cache API though and have ran into weirdness there. We also needed to implement our own Stale-While-Revalidate (SWR) because CF still refuses to implement this properly.

Overall CF is a provider that I would say we begrudging acknowledge as good. Stuff like the SWR thing can be really frustrating but overall reliability and performance are much better since moving to CF.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#145
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> pretty sure you'll never need again?

It doesn't have to be nearly that stark.

If we factor out egress, since it's the same for everything, the bulk retrieval cost for glacier deep archive is only $2.50/TB.

That means that a full year of storage ($12) plus four retrievals ($10) is roughly the same price as a single month of normal S3 storage ($23).

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#147

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.

R2 doesn't support versioning yet. If you need versioning you have to use DigitalOcean Spaces (also cheaper than S3) or S3.

Otherwise, I've been using R2 now in production for wakatime.com for almost a month now with Sippy enabled. The latency and error rates are the same as S3, with DigitalOcean having slightly higher latency and error rates.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

very true, but data gets stale very quickly. So you start putting new data in a new place. Eventually, you don't care about the old place. And all the people and processes who accessed the data in the old place are gone.

Completely agreed about data gravity, but it's not just that, it's also customer opted-in vendor-lockin.

The customer (because they are lazy, don't know better, aren't capable of, or all three) opts in to use various "convenient" CSP "services". These services could look convenient (and are always pretty to extremely expensive), they quickly becomes an integral part of the customer's badly architected "system".

The end result is complete vendor-lockin, the inability of the poor (stupid) user to leave and the continued gang rape of their bank account (also via additional, incompetent developer and devops "resources").

Throw in average modern "devops" who are hired to handle this. They aren't like the sysadmin of yesteryear, they no longer have experience with, or understand the bits and bytes. They are glorified UI clickers and YAML editors, they even lack any reasonable system level debugging skills. For every problem they encounter they first immediately run to google in search for answers.

In addition, I would argue that CSPs are a huge, huge waste of computing, space and power resources, because their systems completely encourage people to just do things, without understanding what they are doing, screw the consequences and just pay.

Result, the business suffers greatly (on so many levels), the CSP wins big and continues winning.

What happens here is that a system, if designed right from the get go, could have been run on a SINGLE, modern, high end, well positioned and connected server to the Internet, is now replaced with tens to hundreds of "instances" and random assorted CSP provided services -- what a colossal waste.

Books can be written on negligence, lack of understanding, utter tech stupidity and ultimately the costs which are absurd.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#149

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.

One major thing that R2 doesn't have is big data distributed table support. E.g. you can use BigQuery to query data on GCS, or you can use Athena on S3.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#150

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.

Just for the sake of enlightening some people. Roughly $1000 per month buys you unlimited/unmetered 10GBe (10GBps) connectivity to your server/rack (do you know what this is?), from a tier-1 network provider.

This translates to roughly 1.2 gigabytes per second (every second of of the month), and 3240 terabytes of data per month - in or out, the choice is yours.

Things scale down as you buy more bandwidth, or commit to a longer contract.

Many would say that $1000 per month is literally "nothing" in terms of costs of service for most real businesses our there, and if you're a happy CSP user, you're probably paying a hell of a lot more than that per month for your infra.

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