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

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#171

Post by sneak » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 12:33 AM UTC

greg-m wrote: post #92

rmason wrote: post #87

What I want to see is Cloudflare enable hosting static websites on R2. For me that would be an absolute game changer. I know you can already host websites on Cloudflare using another service but I want to see R2 get enabled.

We've heard this a few times and will support it :). Also, shameless plug for Cloudflare Pages to host on CF today.

I'd like very much to use Cloudflare Pages but I don't use GitHub due to the fact that GitHub continues to provide services to concentration camp operators. Can I lodge a request to support arbitrary git fetch URLs with a user-supplied deploy privkey? (I self-host Gitea.)

Right now I'm using Netlify and the Netlify CLI lets me upload my static site post-build from CI (which is hooked up to my repos). I've got CF in front of that, but I'd much prefer to keep it all in CF.

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#172

Post by yazaddaruvala » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 12:53 AM UTC

marcc wrote: post #124

flak48 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Based on what I’ve seen in this convo:

- Set up the S3 mirror into R2

- Migrate your code to read from R2.

- Set up SQS to populate with S3 Create events. SQS listeners just make a GET request to R2 for that file.

- Generate S3 events and populate SQS by running List operations or by abusing S3 Lifecycle Management.

- Let it process.

- Switch writes to R2.

This all assumes you can’t delete from S3 till R2 is fully ready. Depending on the application, you could switch over writes to R2 in a different step and also possibly delete the S3 file in the SQS processor.

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#173

Post by whoknowswhat11 » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 1:25 AM UTC

sam0x17 wrote: post #83

heipei wrote: post #53

Slight miscalculation which should have been obvious: "For example, Backblaze B2’s free operations threshold is capped at 2,500 a day, and if R2 simply let you make a GetObject request every second of every day, that would be something like 86,400 FREE daily Gets, which would cost ~$335 daily on B2 or $122,000 a year." Backblaze B2 Class B operations are priced at $0.004 per 10k operations which the author did not ta…

I wonder how this compares with Wasabi. I was very bullish on them a few years ago.

I've tried a bunch of the cheap / unlimited players. Any claim that they offer what S3 offers is usually totally and completely false. Either bandwidth is not actually unlimited or its terrible quality, or storage is not reliable or or or.

With S3 I've never had a problem with data loss. Eventual consistency stuff was totally annoying back when that was the way they did things, though that was documented. Dev support is strong if you are paying for it if you have a config issue. WORM support is great in key areas (regulatory, ransomeware protection for backup durability etc).

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#174

Post by mikesabbagh » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 1:30 AM UTC

when they say free egress, it means there is a rate limit probably. How many GB max can you transfer in 1 day at 10Mbits/s. You have to set a limit as your shared hardware has limits

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#175

Post by gazby » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 1:48 AM UTC

TrueCarry wrote: post #125

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 the…

We did the same transition, but from BunnyCDN (their push option) to S3, but didn't see the level of improvement we wanted. Then we tried Google Storage and hoooly crap it blows s3 out of the water. Cloudflare seems like it's the only remaining player who could compete with them on both quality/speed and price.

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#176

Post by sokoloff » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 1:51 AM UTC

deeblering4 wrote: post #84

mrweasel wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the point is that just having the S3 and CDN isn’t enough to move customers. If you’re using AWS, S3 (and Cloudfront) it will just be a tiny part of your infrastructure, why would you move that out of AWS and lose the integration coming from having everything in AWS?

Because it's significantly cheaper and diversifies your presence across multiple providers. It's a good idea to split origin and CDN, this way requests can be served from cache while origin is down or overloaded. Plus I'd challenge the suggestions that S3 and CDN are a tiny portion of the infrastructure. For a lot of sites it's a significant chunk, things remaining wouldn't be many, maybe compute, DNS, and CI.

> diversifies your presence across multiple providers.

In this case, for most AWS/CF customers, that diversification is of the "downtime on either represents downtime for their customer" variety. (I'm still a fan of this offering and the pressure it put on the current high price of egress bandwidth, of course.)

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#177

Post by inopinatus » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 1:52 AM UTC

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're trying to drive up their volumes in the hope of obtaining more peering.

This is evidently the core of Cloudflare's business strategy, emerging in practically everything they do tactically; from Matthew Prince having an epic public sook earlier this year about AWS's network team telling him to jump in a lake, to this. Peering drives down the marginal cost of bandwidth, and this is super relevant since Cloudflare's main value-add product is DDoS mitigation. Unless you're an incumbent tier 1 carrier (which is the hereditary royalty of networking), the classic ways to obtain more/better peering are either have the most eyeballs, or the most content. A typical access ISP takes the former approach, a CDN like Cloudflare takes the latter.

As usual, free anything means you are the commodity being traded on.

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#178

Post by judge2020 » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 1:54 AM UTC

politician wrote: post #117

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.

Hey Greg, I was just talking to Sales about R2 yesterday, and they said that it was not live yet. Can you clarify availability?

> R2 is currently under development... We’ll be announcing an open beta where any user will be able to sign up for the service soon.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2-object-storage/#:...

In my opinion, expect 3-6 months for the beta, then maybe 2 years for GA. Storage at scale isn't easy, especially if they want to be comparable to aws in speed, SLA, data protection (ie. duplicated to 3+ physical data silos), etc.

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#179

Post by corford » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 1:55 AM UTC

dmw_ng wrote: post #29

Where are all the Backblaze marketing folk? :) B2 has an offer at present where they will eat the cost of a one-time S3 egress in exchange for a 1 year storage commitment. This offer is much more transparent, although I do still admire CloudFlare's strategy here.

Echoing this. We've just made use of that very offer to shift >2billion objects (120TB) from S3 to B2. Migration took over a month but we weren't billed for any of it and are very happy so far.

Re: Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?

#180

Post by bashtoni » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 1:58 AM UTC

I think this question misses the point. Few organisations use just S3 - they use the entire AWS ecosystem, of which S3 plays a central part. The biggest blocker for most enterprises is probably AWS IAM integration.

With S3 I can write a bucket policy that references roles that can be assumed by instances, Lambda functions, people via SSO etc.

With R2, I now need to worry about how to securely distribute credentials to access the buckets, how to rotate those credentials, how to ensure they don't leak. It's perfectly do-able, but it means AWS are always going to have the upper hand.

I'm excited to see some real competition in this space, but switching to R2 has some significant blockers at present. If I was working for Cloudflare on this product, I'd be focusing my effort on how to make integrating R2 with AWS services as simple as possible. I definitely think it's do-able, but it's going to need a team all of its own.