Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3? • Hacker News Board

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#151

Post by wongarsu » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 9:10 PM UTC

mmastrac wrote: post #132

capableweb wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Which is not that different from paying by the TB, as long as you are big enough that your traffic isn't too spiky. If you assume that over the day/week Cloudflare's your bandwidth usage moves between 0.5x and 1.5x of the monthly average, then paying for 1 TB/month is basically the same as paying for 4.5 megabit/s (1TB/month == 3Mb/s, multiply by 1.5 for peak demand).

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#152

Post by aborsy » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 9:15 PM UTC

How about the performance?

S3 is faster than other cloud products such as Dropbox or GCP.

Will R2 be as fast, durable, reliable, etc, with same features, eg, all sorts of encryption key management etc?

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#153

Post by bikeshaving » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 9:32 PM UTC

luhn wrote: post #148

This article touches on the one major unanswered question I have about R2: CloudFlare's CDN ToS make it clear CF is meant to host websites and APIs, not content downloads [1]. Does R2 have similar ToS? It's reasonable that CF doesn't want R2 customers that use 500MB of paid storage and 500TB of free bandwidth, so what is acceptable use? [1] The Services are offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages…

The CEO (eastdakota) has previously said the clause does not apply to services like Cloudflare workers on this very site (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791605). I also think the phrase “Unless explicitly included as part of a Paid Service purchased by you” carries a lot of weight here.

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#154

Post by austinpena » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 9:39 PM UTC

kaixi wrote: post #141

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…

B2 to Cloudflare egress is free, they are both part of Bandwidth Alliance: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/solutions/content-delivery.html

Answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28778286

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#155

Post by ATsch » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 9:56 PM UTC

I think it's kind of sad that, with all of the services offering an object store, nobody has created a better API standard than cloning the weird and clunky S3 API.

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#156

Post by polote » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 9:58 PM UTC

R2 only seems to offer better price than S3. If people using S3 were caring so much about the cost they wouldn't use S3 in the first place. So my bet is that it won't change anything for S3

I also bet it will not change anything for B2. They will still be cheaper than R2

It always funny to see people on HN thinking that price for enterprise companies is a critical factor. It is for some, but for most of them (especially the ones using AWS) it is not

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#157

Post by jeffparsons » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 10:01 PM UTC

How does Cloudflare's billing work? Can I set a hard cap, or is it like AWS where if I'm not careful I could end up with extreme bill shock?

After some bad experiences and reading about other people's bad experiences, I won't use AWS anymore for anything that's not yet big enough to have expensive lawyers and people monitoring expenses daily. So I'm very interested to know how Cloudflare compares on this front.

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#158

Post by kondro » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 10:02 PM UTC

polote wrote: post #156

R2 only seems to offer better price than S3. If people using S3 were caring so much about the cost they wouldn't use S3 in the first place. So my bet is that it won't change anything for S3 I also bet it will not change anything for B2. They will still be cheaper than R2 It always funny to see people on HN thinking that price for enterprise companies is a critical factor. It is for some, but for most of them (especia…

All the alternatives for 11 9's durability object stores have similar prices to S3. There aren't any alternatives.

Wasabi gets close, but their 1:1 storage to egress ratio makes it great for backups and a small subset of use-cases, but not much else.

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#159

Post by kondro » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 10:11 PM UTC

res0nat0r wrote: post #9

The lower egress fees are super nice, but until someone can beat the Glacier Deep Archive pricing @ $0.00099 per GB I'm going to keep using that.

Great pricing, but a 48 hour retrieval window sucks for everything except things you basically never need to retrieve.

I'm not even talking backups here, if you need a backup at all, you probably need it ASAP. This is a governance product.

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#160

Post by idealmedtech » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 10:18 PM UTC

ATsch wrote: post #155

I think it's kind of sad that, with all of the services offering an object store, nobody has created a better API standard than cloning the weird and clunky S3 API.

The problem is not that nobody wants to create or use such an API, the problem is that so much infrastructure and tooling is built up around the S3 API that to forgo it would be to leave your customers high and dry when it comes to integrating.

I think it was the creator of Java that said something to the effect of "There are languages people hate, and languages people don't use", which I think is very applicable here!