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From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

dansdatathoughts.substack.com

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Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#171

Post by pier25 »

stingraycharles wrote: post #115
pier25 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they? Cloudflare doesn't pay for egress and neither does AWS.

But their egress capacity is limited, not? We're talking about 1PB per month here. If every customer of them would be paying only 13 cents a month and pushing out 1PB per month, wouldn't they need to significantly upgrade their hardware and lose money in the process?

> If every customer of them would be paying only 13 cents a month and pushing out 1PB per month...

Which is never going to happen for legitimate use cases.

And Cloudflare has DDOS protection for ilegitimate ones.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#172

Post by Hasz »

thrtythreeforty wrote: post #128
Hasz wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know, R2 offers no storage tiers. Most of my s3 usage is archival and sits in glacier. From Cloudflare's pricing page, S3 is substantially cheaper for that type of workload.

I know people archive all kinds of data. I use Glacier as off-site backup for my measly 1TB of irreplaceable data. But I know many customers put petabytes in it. What could you have a petabyte of that you're pretty sure you'll never need again? What kind of datasets are you storing?

long term work stuff. Things we would be contractually obligated to produce many years down the line.

Plenty of other people storing images, video, etc. a PB is really not that much stuff when it's not just for personal consumption.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#173

Post by explain »

12907835202 wrote: post #109
stingraycharles wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, 1 million downloads @ 1GB is a lot of data transfer. CloudFlare is likely losing money on this.

I'm abusing the hell out of it right now offering GB+ downloads that I used to use Digital Ocean Spaces for. It's saving me $2000-3000 a month since the switch. Maybe abuse isn't the right word but definitely making the most. I am a bit scared about being turned off overnight though.

Same here. What's your bandwidth usage? 500TB/month here for less than $4, on track to be serving petabytes in next few months. Feels so abusive.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#174

Post by dgacmu »

johnjohnnotjohn wrote: post #162
dgacmu wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they're a CDN. You pay for storage already, so an object that isn't downloaded much is paid for. An object that gets downloaded a lot uses bandwidth, but the more popular it is, the more effective the CDN caching is. There probably needs to be an abuse prevention rate limit (and probably is), but it's not quite as crazy as it sounds to just rely on their CDN bandwidth sharing policies instead of charging.

What happens if I host an incredibly popular file, and start eating up everyone else’s share of the bandwidth? ie - I become a popular Linux distro package mirror? I do think there are “soft limits” in place like you say - it’s just my personal preference to have documented limits (or pay fairly for what you use). IMO it helps stop abuse, and prevents billing surprises for legitimate heavy use-cases.

They undoubtedly limit the % of bandwidth you can use when the link is full. The problem with that is that it's very hard to quantify, because whether or not they have spare bandwidth for you depends a lot on location, timing, and what else is happening on the network.

But that's really no different from the guarantee you get from most CDN services. If you're using cloudflare in front of S3, for example, you'll end up with the same behavior.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#175

Post by jpgvm »

csomar wrote: post #161
jpgvm wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are using Workers for ~12mo now with actually very little actual downtime. There have been some regional issues but no world wide outages. That said we don't use any queues, KV, etc. Just pure JS isolates so that probably contributes to the robustness. We do use the Cache API though and have ran into weirdness there. We also needed to implement our own Stale-While-Revalidate (SWR) because CF still refuses to imple…

> Overall CF is a provider that I would say we begrudging acknowledge as good. I don't understand. You say that you used a very small subset of their offering in a very specific and limited way; and with that you conclude that their offering is "good"? Shouldn't you make that conclusion after reviewing at least 50% of their offering?

All of those extra features aren't their offering. Their offering is their network, everything else is just icing.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#176

Post by ddorian43 »

gen220 wrote: post #165
ddorian43 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your competitors can do the same thing though?

That'd be welcome, I'm not really doing it to make money. But reality is a bit more complicated than that. Migrating data + pointers to that data, en masse, isn't super easy (although things like Sippy make it easier). In addition, there's all the capex that's gone into building systems around the assumptions of their blend data centers, homegrown CDNs, mix of storage systems. There's a sunk cost fallacy at play, as…

I'm investigating the same thing. But my bet is that they will either change the terms or lower your cdn-cache size (therefore lowering performance, you can't serve popular videos without a CDN).

And the difference is that you will fail your customers when that time comes because you'll just get suspended (we've seen some cases here on the forum) and you'll have to come here to complain so the ceo/cto resumes things for you.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#177

Post by johnjohnnotjohn »

dgacmu wrote: post #174
johnjohnnotjohn wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens if I host an incredibly popular file, and start eating up everyone else’s share of the bandwidth? ie - I become a popular Linux distro package mirror? I do think there are “soft limits” in place like you say - it’s just my personal preference to have documented limits (or pay fairly for what you use). IMO it helps stop abuse, and prevents billing surprises for legitimate heavy use-cases.

They undoubtedly limit the % of bandwidth you can use when the link is full. The problem with that is that it's very hard to quantify, because whether or not they have spare bandwidth for you depends a lot on location, timing, and what else is happening on the network. But that's really no different from the guarantee you get from most CDN services. If you're using cloudflare in front of S3, for example, you'll end u…

> But that's really no different from the guarantee you get from most CDN services. If you're using cloudflare in front of S3, for example, you'll end up with the same behavior.

But in my mind it’s also comforting that something like Cloudfront has a long-term sustainable model (I should also add with fewer strings attached like hosting video).

I do think the prices ant AWS are too high, but it discourages bad actors from filling up the shared pipes. ISPs are sometimes a classic example of what happens when a link is over subscribed.

Cloudflare’s “soft limits” are also somewhat of a dark pattern if you ask me. I like to know exactly how much something will cost, and it’s really hard to figure out with Cloudflare if you’re a high-traffic source. Do I hit the “soft limits,” or not? It’s really hard to say with their current model.

FWIW, I think Cloudflare is a great product right now - I am just skeptical they can keep it up forever.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#178

Post by 20after4 »

hnwizard wrote: post #148
jgalt212 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

very true, but data gets stale very quickly. So you start putting new data in a new place. Eventually, you don't care about the old place. And all the people and processes who accessed the data in the old place are gone.

Completely agreed about data gravity, but it's not just that, it's also customer opted-in vendor-lockin. The customer (because they are lazy, don't know better, aren't capable of, or all three) opts in to use various "convenient" CSP "services". These services could look convenient (and are always pretty to extremely expensive), they quickly becomes an integral part of the customer's badly architected "system". The e…

It is a colossal waste of resources, indeed.

It's also a huge waste of human effort managing the complexity introduced by the cloud provider's arbitrary bullshit.

At this point multiple generations of engineers have little understanding of underlying layers of technology, having only really learned how to use cloud services. No TCP/IP, no UNIX, just a bit of bash and a ton of AWS.

Cloud providers do hide most of the low level complexity, which could be seen as a benefit (at least that seems to be what's touted as a main benefit, along with instant scalability.) Unfortunately they replace all of that with more arbitrary complexity which is ultimately (in my opinion, at least) a much bigger burden than the fundamental complexity that is abstracted away.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#179

Post by redwood »

The simple reason cloudflare hasn't emerged as a real competitor is that they don't offer traditional compute therefore you can't just do what you normally would do in the hyperscalers in the clouflare regions. If they really are trying to be a fourth hyperscaler and/or compete on price it feels like generql compute is what they need. What am I missing

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#180

Post by gen220 »

ddorian43 wrote: post #176
gen220 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That'd be welcome, I'm not really doing it to make money. But reality is a bit more complicated than that. Migrating data + pointers to that data, en masse, isn't super easy (although things like Sippy make it easier). In addition, there's all the capex that's gone into building systems around the assumptions of their blend data centers, homegrown CDNs, mix of storage systems. There's a sunk cost fallacy at play, as…

I'm investigating the same thing. But my bet is that they will either change the terms or lower your cdn-cache size (therefore lowering performance, you can't serve popular videos without a CDN). And the difference is that you will fail your customers when that time comes because you'll just get suspended (we've seen some cases here on the forum) and you'll have to come here to complain so the ceo/cto resumes things…

I don’t believe anybody on a paid plan has been suspended for using R2 behind the CDN? (I’ve seen the stories you’re alluding to. IIRC the cached files weren’t on R2)

In their docs they explicitly state it as an attractive feature to leverage, so that’d surprise me.

That being said, I’m not planning to serve particularly large files with any meaningful frequency, so in my particular case I’m not concerned about that possibility. (I’m distributing low bitrate audio, and small images, mostly).

If I were trying to build YouTube or whatever I’d be more concerned.

That being said, with their storage pricing and network set up as they are, I think they make plenty of money off of a hypothetical YouTube clone.

I do think they’ll raise prices eventually. But it’s a highly competitive space, so it feels like there’s a stable ceiling.

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