From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity • Hacker News Board

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#41

Post by wfleming » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 8:45 PM UTC

maccam912 wrote: post #35

vladvasiliu wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's E2? Top google result for "e2 blob storage" is azure, but that can't be it since the pricing table comes at around $18/TB/month.

I imagine it was a typo for backblaze B2? The call out that egress is free for the first 3x of what you have stored matches up.

That’s what I thought they meant as well, but B2 is more like $72/TB/yr. Maybe relevant to another story on the front page right now, they have a very unusual custom keyboard layout that makes it easy to typo e for b and 2 for 7 ;)?

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#42

Post by drexlspivey » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 8:45 PM UTC

If I understand correctly when storing data to vanilla S3 (not their edge offering) the data live in a single zone/datacenter right? While on R2 they could potentially be replicated in tens of locations. If that is true how can Cloudflare afford the storage cost with basically the same pricing?

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#43

Post by leiferik » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 8:46 PM UTC

As an indie dev, I recommend R2 highly. No egress is the killer feature. I started using R2 earlier this year for my AI transcription service TurboScribe (https://turboscribe.ai/). Users upload audio/video files directly to R2 buckets (sometimes many large, multi-GB files), which are then transferred to a compute provider for transcription. No vendor lock-in for my compute (ingress is free/cheap pretty much everywhere) and I can easily move workloads across multiple providers. Users can even re-download their (again, potentially large) files with a simple signed R2 URL (again, no egress fees).

I'm also a Backblaze B2 customer, which I also highly recommend and has slightly different trade-offs (R2 is slightly faster in my experience, but B2 is 2-3x cheaper storage, so I use it mostly for backups other files that I'm likely to store a long time).

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#44

Post by vidarh » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 8:49 PM UTC

candiddevmike wrote: post #20

ravetcofx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the economics that Amazon and other providers have egress fees and R2 doesn't? Is it acting as a loss leader or does this model still make money for CloudFlare?

Greed on the cloud providers part, I think. You'd expect egress fees to enable cheaper compute, but there are other cloud providers out there like Hetzner with cheaper compute and egress, so the economics don't really add up.

Indeed, Hetzner is so much cheaper that if you have high S3 egress fees you can rent Hetzner boxes to sit in front of your S3 deployment as caching proxies and get a lot of extra "free" compute on top.

It's an option that's often been attractive if/when you didn't want the hassle of building out something that could provide S3 level durability yourself. But with more/cheaper S3 competitors it's becoming a significantly less attractive option.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#45

Post by jokethrowaway » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 8:52 PM UTC

It blows my mind that anyone would consider S3 cheap.

You always had available plenty of space on dedicated servers for way cheaper before the cloud.

You could make an argument about the API being nicer than dealing with a linux server - but is AWS nice? I think it's pretty awful and requires tons of (different, specific, non transferable) knowledge.

Hype, scalability buzzwords thrown around by startups with 1000 users and 1M contract with AWS.

Sure R2 is cheaper but it's still not a low cost option. You are paying for a nice shiny service.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#46

Post by kkielhofner » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 8:56 PM UTC

chatmasta wrote: post #30

ravetcofx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the economics that Amazon and other providers have egress fees and R2 doesn't? Is it acting as a loss leader or does this model still make money for CloudFlare?

Amazon doesn't have unit cost for egress. They charge you for the stuff you put through their pipe, while paying their transit providers only for the size of the pipe (or more often, not paying them anything since they just peer directly with them at an exchange point). Amazon uses $/gb as a price gouging mechanism and also a QoS constraint. Every bit you send through their pipe is basically printing money for them,…

AWS egress charges blatantly take advantage of people who have never bought transit or done peering.

To them "that's just what bandwidth costs" but anyone who's worked with this stuff (sounds like you and I both) can do the quick math and see what kind of money printing machine this scheme is.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#47

Post by leiferik » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 8:56 PM UTC

vladvasiliu wrote: post #24

tehlike wrote: post #15

If you are storing large amount of data: E2 is the cheapest (20$/TB/year, 3x egress for free) If you are having lots of egress: R2 is the cheapest (15$/TB/month, free egress) R2 can get somewhat expensive if you have lots of mutations, which is not a typical use case for most.

What's E2? Top google result for "e2 blob storage" is azure, but that can't be it since the pricing table comes at around $18/TB/month.

I think Backblaze B2 is probably the reference (which has free egress up to 3x data stored - https://www.backblaze.com/blog/2023-product-announcement/). I don't know of any public S3-compatible provider that is as cheap as 20$/TB/year (roughly ~$0.0016/GB/mo).

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#48

Post by sgammon » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 8:57 PM UTC

We absolutely love R2, especially when paired with Workers.

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#49

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 8:58 PM UTC

chatmasta wrote: post #33

threatofrain wrote: post #4

Cloudflare has been building a micro-AWS/Vercel competitor and I love it; i.e., serverless functions, queues, sqlite, kv store, object store (R2), etc.

Vercel doesn't offer any of that, without major caveats (e.g. must use Next.js to get a serverless endpoint). And to the degree they do offer any of it, it's mostly built on infrastructure of other companies, including Cloudflare.

[deleted]

Re: From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

#50

Post by kkielhofner » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 8:58 PM UTC

miselin wrote: post #16

NicoJuicy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You pay for the capacity of your network. Cloudflare has huge ingress, because they need it to protect sites against DDOS. They basically already pay for their R2 bandwidth ( = egress) because of that. Additionally, with their SDN ( software defined networking) they can fine-tune some of the Data-Flow/bandwidth too. That's how I understood it, fyi. Some more info could be found when they started ( or co-founded, not…

Also, for the CDN case that R2 seems to be targeting - regardless of the origin of the data (R2 or S3), chances are pretty good that Cloudflare is already paying for the egress anyway.

It's actually worse than that.

In the CDN case Cloudflare has to fetch it from the origin, cache (store) it anyway, and then egress it. By charging for R2 they're moving that cost center to a profit one.