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Cloudflare R2 IA storage tier

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Cloudflare R2 IA storage tier

#51

Post by sophacles »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #32
gavinsyancey wrote: post #15

Backblaze B2 is cheaper than Cloudflare R2 IA. Hmmm

I can’t get over the fact how storage is still so expensive in 2024. Lowest you can get is probably $5 per tb a month from any of these companies. A new tb hdd is probably $25 today. Where does the money go, into c suite car payments?

You're comparing apples and oranges here....

A $25/TB drive is not the only expense that $5 goes towards:

* there's actually probably 2 or more HDs holding that TB, since the business is promising that the data won't be lost

* theres the computer(s) that hold that HD.

* theres the electicity, bandwidth and space rental costs for those computers

* theres the cost of employees to make sure that the computers keep running.

* theres the cost of the marketing so that you know that the service is available

* theres all the book-keeping, taxes, cc fees, etc that need to be paid on the recurring charge

* there's (hopefully) profit for the investors/owners

and so on.

Also, on your side you should consider several of those factors yourself to do the comparrison:

* how much do you consider the time spent managing your hdds to be worth? (if you're a business this is employee-hrs, if you're talking about for yourself privately, there's still a value you should attach to your own time)

* do you have backups? If so, what does it cost to put them offsite? (In terms of space rental or favors traded, and your time)

* electricity, etc

* how much is it going to cost you to learn to reliably store your data (in terms of up-front cost, time spent, etc)

* and of course hard drive costs

Re: Cloudflare R2 IA storage tier

#52

Post by Guzba »

radlad wrote: post #44
Guzba wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The example shows leaving your bucket name in the url as a way to filter out requests to other bucket names. If you want your static site to have http://mysite.com/bucketname/index.html then I guess that's ok. But again, careful configuration and still not for every situation. I'm sure you can layer more rules to get it exactly right but I'd not be eager to layer on complex configuration through multiple service prov…

This is an easily solved problem. Backblaze has an example here: https://github.com/backblaze-b2-samples/cloudflare-b2

Does the solution involve using Cloudflare workers? Because, as I said, I'm sure it is possible but maybe we've gone off the deep end a bit. Just how crazy of a configuration do you want just to serve files from an object store?

This looks like an awful lot of setup for "easily solved". Easily solved is what S3 does where this isn't even a problem.

Re: Cloudflare R2 IA storage tier

#53

Post by teruakohatu »

simfree wrote: post #27
historynops wrote: post #16

A fairly unrelated point, but its so strange how companies that underpin a lot of the internet struggle in the stock market. While we all wish we had sold our tech stocks in 2021, Cloudflare still hasn't recovered.

Cloudflare has a very dysfunctional sales pipeline. Their free, premium and self-serve offerings might underpin the internet, but the highly profitable offerings that are gated behind their sales teams are not getting sold. Too many of the clients that they should be selling to. Magic Transit (bring your own ASN), classic website DDoS protection (above the Business $200 tier, which has low, undisclosed data limits in…

> undisclosed data limits in regions like New Zealand

Can you please explain what this means?

Re: Cloudflare R2 IA storage tier

#55

Post by godelski »

lillecarl wrote: post #45
godelski wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really believe there's a missing market. I think there would be big business in building servers for homes. Where you prioritize low power usage and low noise, and do not need blazing speeds or frequent/high access. Cloud is great, but some things should still be stored at home. Home NAS systems are a bit odd and difficult to expand (nowhere near what a rack is). My argument would be that this would be helpful with…

The problem is tech illiteracy and CGNAT. The product must be "a router" so people can access it outside of home. Or it doesn't have to, but then you'll have to proxy traffic through you and charge for it. And your "router server" must have a decent AP, because the likelyhood people know how to bridge their "routeraps" is pretty low. IPv6 would help for sure, but there's still "allow 443 to this box", static registra…

I don't think you're exactly wrong, but I think it is too narrow.

You're perfectly right that there is far too little tech literacy. Even with the example of my parents. But they're an example of someone who I think would especially benefit from this. Because they wouldn't get it out of their own desire, but because I their child would install it for them. Because I don't want to build and piece together everything. Because I'm used to the general tech support of them calling me up, and having to figure out literally everything on the fly because the only time I touch a Windows system is my yearly Christmas visit.

I've ran a NAS in their home before and the reason they stopped is because they got a new router and "it broke." Prior to that I was able to ssh into their network because I had a pi laying around.

But the problem you specify is not the problem you think it is. It is UI/UX. Many of these things can be set up automatically. The reason PGP is a disaster is because it's cumbersome to use. Google making it default and not having to think about it solved that. Signal, iMessage, and WhatsApp made encryption trivial for people who wouldn't have done it before because "it is too hard." I'm unconvinced this is anything different. Where if you take a family member only basically tech literate, can help them do the initial setup, and away you go. You just have to make it as easy as WhatsApp (or even a lot less), and I believe you could.

I say this as someone who is a researcher and does a lot of backend programming. I know we give UI/UX people a lot of shit (and quite often they do deserve it. There are a lot of annoying useless changes), but they do also play a huge role in making technology accessible. Really, that is their main role. And truth be told, the environment has dramatically changed where now a days there's many custom distros that make things easier and even these days my Grandma can use Linux. There's definitely a hardware and backend problem here, but I'm actually convinced the biggest issue is design. Which, let's be real, is what made computers prolific in the first place.

Re: Cloudflare R2 IA storage tier

#56

Post by vineyardmike »

_cenw wrote: post #25
nchmy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and iDrive e2 is even cheaper. https://www.idrive.com/s3-storage-e2/

iDrive is slow and charges extremely high fees for usage above provisioned. They also have a history of increasing prices for individual contracts only a few weeks before renewal, so you can't possibly have enough time to move your data. Hetzner Storage Boxes (2.50-3 EUR per TB) is probably the sweet spot. B2 if you need an object storage API.

Do storage boxes have any availability risk? “Storage box” sounds like you have an actual VM with an attached spinning disk, which doesn’t seem tolerant to hardware failures. I couldn’t find any details on their website about this.

Re: Cloudflare R2 IA storage tier

#57

Post by RantyDave »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #32
gavinsyancey wrote: post #15

Backblaze B2 is cheaper than Cloudflare R2 IA. Hmmm

I can’t get over the fact how storage is still so expensive in 2024. Lowest you can get is probably $5 per tb a month from any of these companies. A new tb hdd is probably $25 today. Where does the money go, into c suite car payments?

Backblaze have written many blog posts on how they go from a few thousand hard drives to a business. For me, the most interesting part was they went from six generations of self designed storage pods to "fuck it, just buy Dell". Long story short: these businesses are surprisingly complicated.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/next-backblaze-storage-pod/

Re: Cloudflare R2 IA storage tier

#58

Post by everforward »

internetter wrote: post #33
ac29 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backblaze is unprofitable and publicly traded, a combination which cant last forever. They raised B2 prices 20% last year, I wouldnt be surprised to see more increases if they continue to burn through cash.

> Backblaze is unprofitable and publicly traded So is Cloudflare

Cloudflare practically has a stranglehold on the modern Internet. I would bet money they would be immediately profitable if they killed their free tier. There aren't that many competitors, and I don't know if they've got the spare capacity to absorb all the exodus.

I'm not so sure about Backblaze. I don't even think they're the biggest player in that space (AWS is, I would guess). I would guess most people could migrate off if Backblaze turned south.

Re: Cloudflare R2 IA storage tier

#59

Post by sborsje »

dmw_ng wrote: post #7
CharlesW wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the cold-to-hot migration "tax" is partially to prevent abuse? > "Data retrieval is charged per GB when data in the Infrequent Access storage class is retrieved and is what allows us to provide storage at a lower price. It reflects the additional computational resources required to fetch data from underlying storage optimized for less frequent access." I like the "automatic storage classes" idea as well. > "…yo…

AWS already give you intelligent tiering for this, it's a very nice product but it's also just a nice way of hiding the same fees. Your $0.004/GB becomes $0.023/GB on first read for 1 month then $0.0125/GB for 2 months, so the average cost of storing it over those 3 months becomes $0.016/GB, and that's before considering monitoring fees

You could also implement tiering yourself, depending on your workload of course. If you know you're storing objects for long-term archival reasons (or backups), you could opt for using S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval at $0.004/GB.

Re: Cloudflare R2 IA storage tier

#60

Post by thrixton »

So pricing is 1c / GB-month, compared to S3 IA at 1.25c / GB-month, a decent saving but not massive, no archive or deep archive options though, I wonder if / when these will come.

What sort of negotiated rates can you get from AWS for bandwidth I wonder, at the moment, that’s seems like the only real benefit from CF I think.

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