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Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

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Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#121

Post by jacurtis »

greg-m wrote: post #98
jacurtis wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to their press release it says: > That's why Cloudflare plans to eliminate egress fees, deliver object storage that is at least 10% cheaper than S3, and make infrequent access completely free for customers A few elements of concern. It says they "plan to", so we don't know if this is near term or some moonshot type of goal. It also states earlier in the press release that the free egress frees are offered v…

Hey, R2 PM here - there's no question that the product will have 0 egress charges, regardless of destination. For archival use-cases, you do still pay us for data storage. We're referring to not charging for operations for infrequent access - we'll likely drop the stored data charge down too, eventually, but the current pricing is complex enough.

Ok, thanks for the clarification. After I wrote that statement about Infrequent Access, I was thinking about it more and realized that you probably pay for storage but simply have no access fees. In other words you don't really distinguish between storage tiers. I think that is good. S3 technically has 7 storage tiers, with all permutations of limited availability zone, reduced redundancy, infrequent access, archival storage, etc. While it is understandable that archival storage is unique (it is tape storage), the others just seem arbitrary and unnecessary.

I am an AWS administrator/architect for work so we are always trying to weigh pros and cons. AWS S3 is notoriously overpriced. This is a well-established fact. There are many other providers that offer comparable solutions (or even superior) such as the new R2. But we feel the effect of vendor lock-in because of S3's integration with other AWS services, which is what keeps a lot of people over-paying for S3. I think the auto-migration feature is potentially one of the best arguments for switching to R2.

R2 is undeniably a better value than S3. S3 requires me to select a region and optionally even limit an availability zone (if I need to keep costs low). CDN/edge locations are all extra cost via AWS Cloudfront. And the reality is many people are already using Cloudflare as CDN in front of S3 storage. So R2 just becomes a no-brainer at that point. I think it will be a successful launch. I am excited to try it.

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#122

Post by DisjointedHunt »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #97
Thaxll wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare still has to pay for transit, so I don't see how hosting a 1GB video being served multi TB per month will work for them.

Cloudflare have a great blog post about this: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/ The short answer is that at AWS/Cloudflare scale you’re paying a fixed cost for networking capacity, not for transit per byte. So their cost doesn’t scale anywhere near the way AWS egress costs do, and if they want it can just be free.

Yup, precisely. They buy “capacity” ie the equivalent of making an infrastructure investment. AWS does the same.

Now, AWS chooses to price their network usage as a utility, ie, you pay per unit of data transmitted. This is ridiculous for enterprise scale.

Cloudflare uses their purchased capacity as a strategic differentiator by basically letting you use as much as you want because they have so much purchased, you wouldn’t ever make a dent.

Any services behind this differentiator are what they can charge for. Like I said above, the margins in cloud are ridiculously high. This is why these companies are amongst the few in the world valued over a Trillion dollars. Throw in an upstart who has the strategic advantage and technical competence that Cloudflare has and boy, do we have a winner . The next few years will be very interesting.

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#123

Post by flak48 »

marcc wrote: post #80
gopalv wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just point my code to read/write from/to R2 instead of S3 This is probably worse for CloudFront than for S3 itself. Double paying for storage is still going to be cheaper than egress fees overall.

Good point about double paying for storage. There's a long migration problem here to clean up. Most of my buckets have some frequently and some very infrequently accessed objects. To address this, there needs to be some sort of an active migration tool? Does R2 have this built in?

Just an idea, maybe the first fetch from S3 should be allowed by R2 do delete the original object from S3 too, so that eventually we're only left with two mutually exclusive sets of files (and no double storage)

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#124

Post by marcc »

flak48 wrote: post #123
marcc wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point about double paying for storage. There's a long migration problem here to clean up. Most of my buckets have some frequently and some very infrequently accessed objects. To address this, there needs to be some sort of an active migration tool? Does R2 have this built in?

Just an idea, maybe the first fetch from S3 should be allowed by R2 do delete the original object from S3 too, so that eventually we're only left with two mutually exclusive sets of files (and no double storage)

I thought about that too. It's could be a good solution because the challenge otherwise is going to be listing all objects in the bucket and comparing to what's in the R2 bucket, right?

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#125

Post by TrueCarry »

We used DigitalOcean Spaces for some time, but it works very slow. Every few requests we get 500-5000ms delays. So we switched to Amazon S3 and it works much better. So when I first saw R2, I was sure we're gonna migrate as soon as we can. Post mentions that Backblaze and Wasabi offer better prices, but I couldn't find any reviews at the time when we migrated to amazon. Is it gonna work as DigitalOcean? How often there's downtime? Does anybody use them and has opinion?

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#126

Post by [deleted] »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #33

I think AWS backed themselves into a corner with their extremely high egress charges. I would wager that a pretty considerable amount of their revenue is from egress, so if they have to reduce egress pricing, it will take a pretty big chunk of their revenue. Of course, I could be completely wrong. I would certainly welcome a correction.

[deleted]

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#127

Post by dcolkitt »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #8

Personally I find Backblaze B2 more compelling. ... Ok, after writing that, I realized that I should probably look up R2's offering first. And then my jaw hit the floor at "free egress bandwidth". Free egress bandwidth ? Yes please. I will instantly convert. Then I was worried about price per GB. $0.015/GB is incredibly competitive. Good lord, where do I get early access to this thing? I'd transition all our infra to…

Free egress is huge for my data pipeline workloads. I hate getting silo-ed into a single cloud provider, because my data lives there and it's too expensive to run the compute jobs on another cloud due to the cost of moving the data.

For example GCP has a much better Kubernetes offering than AWS, but everything's native to S3. So you get stuck using crappier products. If R2 offered free egress, I'd move the entire data lake there just to sidestep this problem.

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#128

Post by NicoJuicy »

DeathArrow wrote: post #40
sillysaurusx wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Responding to a deleted but interesting comment. Normally I wouldn't do this, but it's harmless enough: > Backblaze B2 transfer to Cloudflare is free egress due to bandwidth alliance and Cloudflare CDN is free egress. So you already kinda have that. Hmm... What does it mean to transfer to Cloudflare? That's interesting. I want free egress to my Hetzner servers. (4x16TB for $79EU/mo is unbeatable, primarily because He…

They offer a serverless platform. If you want free egress, you can check Wasabi: https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/#three-info

Wasabi charges for your largest file for 3 months.

You only get "free" egress for the size of your storage.

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#129

Post by capableweb »

wongarsu wrote: post #105
maxpert wrote: post #19

How is Cloudflare gonna coup up the price? These numbers are too good to be true (Sorry I am naive in how egress pricing works).

They charge three times the cost for storage compared to B2 etc. Egress bandwidth in a datacenter costs around $7/TB for you or me, probably far less for a company like Cloudflare that's built around handling huge traffic volumes. Similarly they can use slow storage for most files and use their existing caching solutions for storing frequently accessed files. They'll probably lose some money on customers who use lots…

> Egress bandwidth in a datacenter costs around $7/TB for you or me, probably far less for a company like Cloudflare that's built around handling huge traffic volumes.

Funny thing, paying for egress bandwidth is not something you do if you handle your own peering and other internet infrastructure. Paying for bandwidth is something that the cloud providers came up with to add further margin. So they likely pay $0/TB for that bandwidth.

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#130

Post by capableweb »

res0nat0r wrote: post #45
unethical_ban wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Archive" Archive is great for archiving. S3 standard tier is not for archiving.

My #1 concern is total monthly cost to store data, that's it.

Then R2 is worse for you than S3 as the entire point of R2 seems to be to do a different tradeoff than S3. You pay more for total storage but less for bandwidth with R2, and vice-versa for S3.
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