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From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

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Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#111
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.

There's at least a couple of reasons that your analogy doesn't really work.

First a lot of these roads are 'free' and yet you're still being charged for it. If two large networks come to an agreement then they connect the two networks (ie build that road), but no money changes hands.

Second if there is a paid peering agreement in place (ie say AWS had a cost to push your data out), that still wouldn't be billed to them in the way they're charging you. Instead they'd be paying for the rate of traffic at something like the 95th percentile of the max. This means that you could download a petabyte of data from them when the pipe isn't busy and cost them nothing, or you could download a gigabyte when it's busy and push up the costs.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#112

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.

Why would they?

Cloudflare doesn't pay for egress and neither does AWS.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I left AWS in 2019, so my knowledge on the current recommendations & pricing is dated. But even back then we were strongly discouraging usage like this for S3 for both security and cost reasons. Cloudfront should be in front of your bucket serving the objects, and IIRC it’ll be 75% cheaper in most cases. Still doesn’t bring it within even a couple of orders of magnitude of the R2 price, but this comparison does feel…

Don’t those volume discounts kick in once you’re doing near 1PB? You’re still paying “normal” CloudFront prices all the way up and it also varies per region :$ https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/

There’s definitely volume discounts for CloudFront too. Or, there was. As I said my intimate knowledge here is years old.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#114
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also, egress fees are a sort of vendor lock-in, because getting data out of the cloud is vastly more expensive then putting new data into the cloud..

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.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#115
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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?

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#116
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?

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

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#117

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.

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.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#118
post #29

I just love minio. It is a drop-in replacement for S3. I have never done a price comparison for TOC to S3 or R2, but I have a good backup story and run it all inside docker/dokku so it is easy to recover.

We went from s3 to minio because cost issues (at that time b2 didn't have s3 API)

Minio to seaweedfs around 2020 because our minio servers had problems serving very large number of small files.

Then this year we migrate to B2 because it's way cheaper and we don't have to rewrite our apps.

Still my hat goes to S3. It is so massive that every open source or competitors need to have compatible API and it give us the ability to move to any vendor or selfhost just by changing endpoint.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#119

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

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#120

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

I left AWS in 2019, so my knowledge on the current recommendations & pricing is dated. But even back then we were strongly discouraging usage like this for S3 for both security and cost reasons. Cloudfront should be in front of your bucket serving the objects, and IIRC it’ll be 75% cheaper in most cases. Still doesn’t bring it within even a couple of orders of magnitude of the R2 price, but this comparison does feel…

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