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

161–170 of 183 posts

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#161

Post by csomar »

jpgvm wrote: post #144
csomar wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 imple…

> Overall CF is a provider that I would say we begrudging acknowledge as good.

I don't understand. You say that you used a very small subset of their offering in a very specific and limited way; and with that you conclude that their offering is "good"? Shouldn't you make that conclusion after reviewing at least 50% of their offering?

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#162

Post by johnjohnnotjohn »

dgacmu wrote: post #157
johnjohnnotjohn wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 jus…

Because they're a CDN. You pay for storage already, so an object that isn't downloaded much is paid for. An object that gets downloaded a lot uses bandwidth, but the more popular it is, the more effective the CDN caching is. There probably needs to be an abuse prevention rate limit (and probably is), but it's not quite as crazy as it sounds to just rely on their CDN bandwidth sharing policies instead of charging.

What happens if I host an incredibly popular file, and start eating up everyone else’s share of the bandwidth? ie - I become a popular Linux distro package mirror?

I do think there are “soft limits” in place like you say - it’s just my personal preference to have documented limits (or pay fairly for what you use). IMO it helps stop abuse, and prevents billing surprises for legitimate heavy use-cases.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#163

Post by Sai_ »

55555 wrote: post #126
eastdakota wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just as an fyi, eastDakota is in Cloudflare’s executive team. Think he’s their CEO.

Not saying not to trust him - he’s probably a very reasonable and standup guy - but you should know this about him before taking his word on a topic like this.

No disrespect @eastDakota

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#164

Post by meowface »

It looks like Backblaze B2 combined with Cloudflare gives the cheapest storage and free egress. Is there any reason to use R2 over B2 + Cloudflare?

My use case is image storage + serving for a service that users will upload a lot of images to. Currently using Cloudflare + storing all files on disk but space will soon become a concern.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#165

Post by gen220 »

ddorian43 wrote: post #139
gen220 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That'd be welcome, I'm not really doing it to make money.

But reality is a bit more complicated than that. Migrating data + pointers to that data, en masse, isn't super easy (although things like Sippy make it easier).

In addition, there's all the capex that's gone into building systems around the assumptions of their blend data centers, homegrown CDNs, mix of storage systems. There's a sunk cost fallacy at play, as well as the inertia of knowing how to maintain the old system and not having any experience with the new system.

It's not impossible, but it'd require a lot of willpower and energy that these companies (who are 10+ years into their life cycles) don't really possess.

Having seen the inside of orgs like that before, starting from scratch is ~10x-100x easier, depending on the blend of bureaucracy on the menu.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#166

Post by njs12345 »

MGriisser wrote: post #83
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.

Is R2 subject to Cloudflare's universal API rate limit? They have an API rate limit of 1200 requests/5 minutes that I've hit many times with their images product. And they won't increase it unless you become an enterprise customer in which case they'll generously double it.

There is the Images Batch API that isn't subject to the 1200 requests/5 minutes limit: https://developers.cloudflare.com/images/cloudflare-images/u...

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#168

Post by klysm »

sydbarrett74 wrote: post #167

My fear is that as R2 becomes more 'discovered' and adopted, Cloudflare will hike prices since they'll have a captive audience.

It seems so inevitable. Once they have sucked enough data up then they can just change the pricing structure to have egress fees and higher storage fees.

Although I do wonder if that would be considered a bait and switch.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#169

Post by leiferik »

munkinasack wrote: post #119
leiferik wrote: post #43

As an indie dev, I recommend R2 highly. No egress is the killer feature. I started using R2 earlier this year for my AI transcription service TurboScribe ( https://turboscribe.ai/ ). Users upload audio/video files directly to R2 buckets (sometimes many large, multi-GB files), which are then transferred to a compute provider for transcription. No vendor lock-in for my compute (ingress is free/cheap pretty much everywh…

Have you looked into Worker AI? I’m actually curious to know what the cost difference would be for your compute setup vs. Workers AI

The premise of Workers AI is really cool and I'm excited to see where it goes. It would need other features (custom code, custom models, etc) to make it worth considering for my needs, but I love that CF is building stuff like this.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#170

Post by apitman »

Interesting side note that while S3 the service continues to get more competition, S3 the protocol has definitively won. It's a good protocol, but man I wish it were more consumer-friendly. Imagine if S3 specified an OAuth2 profile for granting access. Every web app could delegate storage to a bunch of competing storage providers.

This would be very useful in genomics, where pretty much everything is stored on S3 but always a pain to connect to apps.

Post reply on HN