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Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage, minus the egress fees

blog.cloudflare.com

161–170 of 220 posts

Re: Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage, minus the egress fees

#161
post #5

Interesting pricing considering Backblaze is another Bandwidth Alliance member and they only charge $0.005/GBmonth (vs. $0.015/GBmonth). B2 + CloudFlare gives you a similar deal at a third the cost.

Very much depends on what you're utilizing Backblaze for. It's unusable for volume image hosting for example. It has severe performance problems with small files, as does much of the object storage field (including DigitalOcean, they directly warn customers not to bother using their object storage for small files if performance is a concern). The CDN doesn't help much, Backblaze chokes if you try to shovel a large nu…

This is true - most of the object storage providers are really bad at serving data fast, they more focused on a cold storage. Tebi.io works really fast for small files, plus it is a geo-distributed object storage meaning that data is physically stored in different locations around the world, greatly reducing latency.

Backblaze, DO Spaces simply were not designed for this in the first place.

Re: Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage, minus the egress fees

#162
post #11

Very exciting. Object storage is getting really competitive and i love the naming scheme alliance - S3, B2 (Backblaze) and now R2, who will do one with a “1”? On a serious note i’m wondering about the signed urls and ACL capabilities of the cloudflare offering cause this is something we use. I’m also interested does R2 replace S3 and CloudFront at the same time? That’d be nice and one headache less.

> Our vision for R2 includes multi-region storage that automatically replicates objects to the locations they’re frequently requested from.

Seems like they are going to automatically replicate data to other regions. Something like tebi.io is doing for a long time already, it is a geo-distributed S3-compatible storage that is replicating data across the world to reduce read/write latency and increase speed.

If it is done right, this might increase download speeds by a lot especially for big infrequently accessed files.

Re: Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage, minus the egress fees

#163
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

B2 charges for egress, $0.01/GB. More interesting to me is Wasabi, which charges ~$0.006/GB*month and no egress fees at all.

Wasabi egress is free, but they "reserve the right to limit or suspend your service"[0] if it doesn't fit the usage patterns they've designed for. [0]: https://wasabi.com/paygo-pricing-faq/#free-egress-policy

Huh, thanks for that. I hadn't noticed (was that always there??). So, sustained egress at rate R/sec means I have to use 2500000 * R amount of storage per month, hrm...

Possibly can't use it for one of the "ponies" I was working on, but probably still good as "ye huge media archive".

Re: Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage, minus the egress fees

#164
post #137
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if R2 is S3 with no egress, suddenly there is a value proposition again. Isn't B2 from Backblaze already filling that need? I means more choice is always better for sure, but considering R2 goal seems really to be a CDN more than a backup space and it does feel like their money maker is in the CDN part, not the storage part... I feel like trusting them to store it long-term without using the CDN part is a little…

B2 charges for egress, $0.01/GB. More interesting to me is Wasabi, which charges ~$0.006/GB*month and no egress fees at all.

B2 doesn't charge for egress to Cloudflare. (https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/)

Re: Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage, minus the egress fees

#165
post #106

This is interesting ... For the longest time we tried to convince people that they should have an off-amazon archive of their S3 data ... we even ran an ads to that effect in 2012[1]. The (obvious) reason this isn't compelling is the cost of egress. It's just (relatively) too expensive to offload your S3 assets to some third party on a regular basis. So if R2 is S3 with no egress, suddenly there is a value propositio…

> 'rclone'[2][3] which allows you to move data from cloud to cloud without involving your own bandwidth Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but the data does pass through the machine where rclone is running. rclone does support remote-to-remote transfers[0], but I believe only for remotes of the same type (ie S3 to S3). [0]: https://rclone.org/docs/#server-side-copy

Does this mean "remotes that speak the S3 protocol", or "remotes that are S3"? The former would require S3 supporting induced requests (so it POSTed the data somewhere), the latter would require a "copy" operation on S3. I don't know which one is supported.

Re: Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage, minus the egress fees

#166
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

B2 charges for egress, $0.01/GB. More interesting to me is Wasabi, which charges ~$0.006/GB*month and no egress fees at all.

B2 doesn't charge for egress to Cloudflare. ( https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ )

(stupid question) What does that get me? Does Cloudflare have cheap VMs I can rent with competitive prices? (including data egress fees?)

For object storage that I play with, some clients are in the cloud, with most sitting at home behind residential internet.

Re: Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage, minus the egress fees

#167
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

B2 doesn't charge for egress to Cloudflare. ( https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ )

(stupid question) What does that get me? Does Cloudflare have cheap VMs I can rent with competitive prices? (including data egress fees?) For object storage that I play with, some clients are in the cloud, with most sitting at home behind residential internet.

(approximately) Cloudflare provides a proxy service that you'd use to access your B2 data from home or other cloud without paying for egress.

They can do this because it costs almost nothing to move data between B2 and Cloudflare, and then from Cloudflare to almost anywhere. Moving data from B2 to most other places on the internet likely costs them more because Backblaze isn't in a position to negotiate adventagous peering agreements with ISPs.

Re: Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage, minus the egress fees

#168

>providing zero-cost egress for stored objects — no matter your request rate What's the catch? Imagine a few cases. Let's assume s3 volume rate of $50/TB. -I post 1gb video file on Reddit. 100k downloads / month: $5k -I make a 1gb desktop app. I have 100k downloads / month: $5k -I post 100gb data file on Github. 10K downloads / month: $50k. Would I pay $0 on R2? And would there be throttling / rate-limiting? [Edit: A…

Getting 100k people to download 100GB seems like a rather lofty goal. Has this ever been done via social media? The only case I can think of is a game like Call of Duty, which has a ginormous marketing campaign behind it. Even so the download wasn't linked via social media.

Most people don't even have 100k followers. The follower-to-click ratio isn't going to be 100% in any situation. Click-to-full-download ratio is going to be low too, especially so at 100GB. A lot of people don't have that much free space on their devices even!

I think this scenario is firmly in outlier land, and thus not really relevant to cloudflare's calculations.

Re: Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage, minus the egress fees

#170
post #167
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(stupid question) What does that get me? Does Cloudflare have cheap VMs I can rent with competitive prices? (including data egress fees?) For object storage that I play with, some clients are in the cloud, with most sitting at home behind residential internet.

(approximately) Cloudflare provides a proxy service that you'd use to access your B2 data from home or other cloud without paying for egress. They can do this because it costs almost nothing to move data between B2 and Cloudflare, and then from Cloudflare to almost anywhere. Moving data from B2 to most other places on the internet likely costs them more because Backblaze isn't in a position to negotiate adventagous p…

Wow! Cool! Very surprised that Cloudflare wouldn't charge an arm and a leg for such a service... considering they're moving the actual bits.

I'm poking around at the Cloudflare website, what's the name of the aforementioned service? What term should I google?

I'm ignorant of "modern Cloudflare" -- other than reading their fantastic technical blog, I've never used them in a professional capacity and don't know their product offering -- other than a cache, CDN, DDOS protection, and a Lambda.

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