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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?

#131

Post by foobiekr »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #24
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).

Bandwidth is very cheap [1], cloud providers gouge. Cloudflare is using this product to disrupt other cloud providers and pull business from them. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682237

Yes basically. In networking everybody except for people living on a CSP buy bandwith/ports not bits moved. AWS egress is fabulously profitable specifically because they’re ripping you off vs even a very expensive colo.

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#132

Post by mmastrac »

capableweb wrote: post #129
wongarsu wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

CloudFlare has a good blog post on this, but effectively they pay for megabit/s capability.

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#134

Post by sillysaurusx »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #107
greg-m wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks! R2 coming out with $0 egress is somewhere between unbelievable and literal-miracle. I suppose my only skepticism is "but how fast can I egress?" -- if the bandwidth is 100x slower than GCP, it might dampen my enthusiasm a little bit. But honestly I'd still take a 100x slowdown if it means I can do long term archival without paying $200 just to download the data, soooo.... Anyway, cheers, and thanks for doing…

(@CameronNemo: If you want to chat about it, you'll have to DM me on twitter. As you see, comments here about it are instakilled.)

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#135

Post by tommoor »

marcc wrote: post #23

IMO, the best feature Cloudflare added to R2 was the automatic migration. This makes sense for a CDN to offer, but if R2 works, this makes it pretty simple to migrate. "After specifying an existing storage bucket, R2 will serve requests for objects from the existing bucket," I've Beene evaluating R2, but this migration path makes it dead simple to use. I just point my code to read/write from/to R2 instead of S3, and…

hard same, the automatic migration is a big deal!

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#136

Post by dadrian »

Let's say you sell a data product that generates around 1TB per day, which is downloaded by every customer once. On AWS/GCP, that's roughly $80/day/customer in egress costs, which would make the minimum pricing of the data product $30K/year to break even SOLELY egress, assuming each customer only does the download once.

It's basically not possible to offer something like this on AWS or GCP, you have to run your own server somewhere with flat bandwidth pricing. If I were still in the data business, I'd absolutely be moving everything to R2.

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#137

Post by mattjaynes »

In any comparisons with B2, don't forget to consider that they have a 2 hour maintenance window every Thursday during the US business day: https://www.backblaze.com/scheduled-maintenance.html

They usually don't go down during that time, but sometimes they do and their support told us to always expect outages during this time.

If you need your B2 data available during those windows, you'll need to also set up a failover data source for those times.

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#138

Post by NicoJuicy »

capableweb wrote: post #130
res0nat0r wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where did you get that from? R2 is cheaper for storage too then s3

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#139

Post by mattjaynes »

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…

As mentioned in another comment, don't forget to consider B2's weekly 2 hour maintenance windows during the US work day: https://www.backblaze.com/scheduled-maintenance.html

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#140

Post by Matheus28 »

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.

I honestly can't see how it'd be profitable if someone were to host several TB worth of files that are very frequently downloaded. My fear with anything "free" is that once you actually use it A LOT, it will be pulled from under you. I'm a lot more comfortable with $0.001/GB than $0/GB.
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