[HN Gopher] Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?
___________________________________________________________________
Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?
Author : cloudfalcon
Score : 271 points
Date : 2021-10-06 16:08 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.taloflow.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.taloflow.ai)
| ATsch wrote:
| I think it's kind of sad that, with all of the services offering
| an object store, nobody has created a better API standard than
| cloning the weird and clunky S3 API.
| idealmedtech wrote:
| The problem is not that nobody wants to create or use such an
| API, the problem is that so much infrastructure and tooling is
| built up around the S3 API that to forgo it would be to leave
| your customers high and dry when it comes to integrating.
|
| I think it was the creator of Java that said something to the
| effect of "There are languages people hate, and languages
| people don't use", which I think is very applicable here!
| joemaller1 wrote:
| Yes. The instant I get access.
|
| This plus CloudFlare Workers might replace quite a few AWS
| S3/Lambda projects.
| polote wrote:
| R2 only seems to offer better price than S3. If people using S3
| were caring so much about the cost they wouldn't use S3 in the
| first place. So my bet is that it won't change anything for S3
|
| I also bet it will not change anything for B2. They will still be
| cheaper than R2
|
| It always funny to see people on HN thinking that price for
| enterprise companies is a critical factor. It is for some, but
| for most of them (especially the ones using AWS) it is not
| kondro wrote:
| All the alternatives for 11 9's durability object stores have
| similar prices to S3. There aren't any alternatives.
|
| Wasabi gets close, but their 1:1 storage to egress ratio makes
| it great for backups and a small subset of use-cases, but not
| much else.
| rmason wrote:
| 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.
| greg-m wrote:
| We've heard this a few times and will support it :). Also,
| shameless plug for Cloudflare Pages to host on CF today.
| rmason wrote:
| Thanks Greg,
|
| You just made my day!
| aborsy wrote:
| How about the performance?
|
| S3 is faster than other cloud products such as Dropbox or GCP.
|
| Will R2 be as fast, durable, reliable, etc, with same features,
| eg, all sorts of encryption key management etc?
| dmw_ng wrote:
| 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.
| jeffparsons wrote:
| How does Cloudflare's billing work? Can I set a hard cap, or is
| it like AWS where if I'm not careful I could end up with extreme
| bill shock?
|
| After some bad experiences and reading about other people's bad
| experiences, I won't use AWS anymore for anything that's not yet
| big enough to have expensive lawyers and people monitoring
| expenses daily. So I'm very interested to know how Cloudflare
| compares on this front.
| luhn wrote:
| This article touches on the one major unanswered question I have
| about R2: CloudFlare's CDN ToS make it clear CF is meant to host
| websites and APIs, not content downloads [1]. Does R2 have
| similar ToS? It's reasonable that CF doesn't want R2 customers
| that use 500MB of paid storage and 500TB of free bandwidth, so
| what is acceptable use?
|
| [1] The Services are offered primarily as a platform to cache and
| serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as part
| of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Services
| solely for the purpose of (i) serving web pages as viewed through
| a web browser or other functionally equivalent applications,
| including rendering Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or other
| functional equivalents, and (ii) serving web APIs subject to the
| restrictions set forth in this Section 2.8. Use of the Services
| for serving video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures,
| audio files, or other non-HTML content is prohibited, unless
| purchased separately as part of a Paid Service or expressly
| allowed under our Supplemental Terms for a specific Service.
| nightpool wrote:
| Cloudflare's CEO (eastdakota) has said publicly that that
| section doesn't apply to R2 and that they'll update their TOS
| to clarify: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682885
| bikeshaving wrote:
| The CEO (eastdakota) has previously said the clause does not
| apply to services like Cloudflare workers on this very site
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791605). I also think
| the phrase "Unless explicitly included as part of a Paid
| Service purchased by you" carries a lot of weight here.
| Thaxll wrote:
| So Cloudflare comfirms that we can use R2 to store public docker
| images that will serve TB of content per month almost free?
| bserge wrote:
| Will bigcorp 1 win against Megacorp 2? Find out in the next
| episode!
|
| Just co-locate your stuff, please.
| xwdv wrote:
| > Just co-locate your stuff, please.
|
| No thanks, too time consuming and too many liabilities.
| ignoramous wrote:
| I've commented elsewhere, and I'll comment here again: Cloudflare
| R2 is really a re-packaging / re-positioning of how most
| customers were using Cloudflare's CDN in the first place: As a
| low-cost content delivery network. As a small tech shop, we front
| S3 with Cloudflare (not CloudFront, because it's relatively
| expensive) for binary downloads, and pay single digit $ to AWS
| and $0 to Cloudflare. If we were pushing blobs through S3 +
| accelerated buckets; or S3 + CloudFront; or S3 + transfer-
| acceleration, our AWS bill would have been 3x / 5x.
|
| Relying on Cloudflare to do tiered-caching / transfer-
| acceleration afforded by tight integration between its CDN and R2
| would lead us to drop S3 altogether for our workloads.
|
| We've also experimented using Workers KV as a blob store (it has
| a cap of 25MB per key; costs $5 per million writes, $0.5 per
| million reads; $5 per 10GB of storage; _zero_ egress fee) and its
| pricing comes out _cheaper_ than S3. We 'd have moved to KV
| already if R2 hadn't been announced. Now, we think it is prudent
| to bide our time till R2 goes public.
|
| But: we are a rather tiny tech shop and agonize over bill items
| like _egress_ ; most enterprises worry more about data security,
| compliance, and integration with big-data tools (like EMR,
| Athena, Firehose, RedShift etc). So, I am not sure if there'd be
| an exodus off-the-bat (at least not until Cloudflare has
| equivalent integrations / services in-place [0]). Though, I can
| see why companies like smugmug (who have been using S3 since
| 2006!) _may_ move.
|
| The killer here is, R2 will sweep away dev shops at the low-end
| of the market. If anyone's starting a bootstrapped SaaS company,
| not only does Cloudflare becomes _the_ place for them to
| prototype a MVP (as opposed to AWS /Azure/GCP) but also an
| integration point for their offerings (consider: a Tableau
| competitor + R2) [1]. As noted by Ben Thompson a few days ago,
| there's little AWS can do despite knowing what's in store, other
| than cannibalize their own business (which they're not afraid to
| do!) [2]. We are entering uncharted waters here: Two companies
| fully drowning in HBS credos going after each other. Wonder what
| Clayton Christensen would have thought of that.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_contagion
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network
|
| [2] https://stratechery.com/2021/cloudflares-disruption/
| breakingcups wrote:
| A big difference is that it was really scary to run up against
| their non-HTML content policy, which I presume isn't the case
| with this new object storage.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I think AWS backed themselves into a corner with their extremely
| high egress charges. I would wager that a pretty considerable
| amount of their revenue is from egress, so if they have to reduce
| egress pricing, it will take a pretty big chunk of their revenue.
|
| Of course, I could be completely wrong. I would certainly welcome
| a correction.
| rednerrus wrote:
| Half of my AWS spend every month is egress...
| amluto wrote:
| I wonder what fraction of AWS revenue is providers of
| complementary services that are forced to host at AWS so their
| AWS-using customers don't have to pay for egress.
| [deleted]
| jen20 wrote:
| Given the pricing, and the ability to fault in storage from S3 in
| any case, almost certainly "yes" is the answer to the headline,
| in stunning contradiction to Betteridge's law!
| tanbyte wrote:
| Won't be surprised if AWS counters this sooner or later in terms
| of reducing egress fee, but the fact that S3 is core to AWS's eco
| system and ties in well, is another blocker for migration
| spullara wrote:
| "Your margin is my opportunity." - Jeff Bezos
| bethecloud wrote:
| Very nice to see the economical comparison include decentralized
| storage providers like Storj DCS
| [deleted]
| heipei wrote:
| 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 take into account, so the
| calculation above is off by a factor of 10,000. The real cost for
| 1 GET per second for a whole year on Backblaze B2 is $12.59.
| cloudfalcon wrote:
| You're right. This is a silly mistake on my part in rushing out
| this piece. I apologize. Thanks for pointing this out -I've
| since taken out the paragraph.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| why rush a piece?
| dboreham wrote:
| More clicks?
| cloudfalcon wrote:
| Cloudflare R2 is topical right now - that was the
| motivation. Not saying it was the right strategy to do so
| (clearly not given the mistake).
| _hilro wrote:
| Did you just silently edit out that part and not put some
| text noting your previous mistake?
|
| You even have a section of the article called "Hacker
| News Comment Responses"! Then you failed to mention the
| OP comment you're replying to:
|
| That is very bad form and untrustworthy behaviour.
| cloudfalcon wrote:
| I'm following good form. No silent edits were made. There
| has been an Author's Note in that paragraph the entire
| time since the change acknowledging the miscalculation.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| I wonder how this compares with Wasabi. I was very bullish on
| them a few years ago.
| sparc24 wrote:
| Wasabi is a clown show brought to you by the Carbonite guys.
| I wouldn't trust it at all given their track record.
| nightpool wrote:
| Wasabi has the most horrendous reliability record of any
| provider I've ever worked with. Uploads will be broken for
| days at a time with no status posted, downloads will flake,
| it's just not a competitive solution for consumer-facing
| storage.
| junon wrote:
| I skipped this and read the original announcement. Cloudflare has
| some serious skin in this game it seems - definitely earned
| raised eyebrows.
|
| The migration bit alone is going to be enough to motivate PMs and
| devs to switch. The free egress seems insane from a business
| perspective but if Cloudflare wants to do it them I'm all for it.
|
| Very cool.
| [deleted]
| ehutch79 wrote:
| Only if they start onboarding people.
|
| I'm pretty sure R2 is what I was looking for to solve a specific
| problem.
| pqdbr wrote:
| AWS's bandwidth pricing is already crazy expensive on US, but
| when you look at LATAM pricing (Sao Paulo) it's simply
| outrageous. And you're paying in USD with a devalued BRL.
|
| If Cloudflare really delivers R2 with free egress and a global
| CDN you'd have to be crazy not to switch.
| mmastrac wrote:
| I'm glad the article pointed out Q1 as the next opportunity
| brian_herman wrote:
| What about P0?
| nixarn wrote:
| And O-1
| austinpena wrote:
| I don't think that goes far enough. So I made this
|
| https://object-storage-name-generator.com
| jerf wrote:
| Reminds me of this old Dilbert cartoon:
| https://dilbert.com/strip/1998-12-12
|
| "I would have synergized harder, but I got tired of clicking
| the button!"
| austinpena wrote:
| Haha! I need to work on my Start-Up slang if a Dilbert beat
| me to the punch by ~23 years
| maxpert wrote:
| 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).
| wongarsu wrote:
| They charge three times the cost for storage compared to B2
| etc. Egress bandwidth in a datacenter costs around $7/TB for
| you or me, probably far less for a company like Cloudflare
| that's built around handling huge traffic volumes.
|
| Similarly they can use slow storage for most files and use
| their existing caching solutions for storing frequently
| accessed files.
|
| They'll probably lose some money on customers who use lots of
| bandwidth, and make lots of money on everyone else.
| capableweb wrote:
| > Egress bandwidth in a datacenter costs around $7/TB for you
| or me, probably far less for a company like Cloudflare that's
| built around handling huge traffic volumes.
|
| Funny thing, paying for egress bandwidth is not something you
| do if you handle your own peering and other internet
| infrastructure. Paying for bandwidth is something that the
| cloud providers came up with to add further margin. So they
| likely pay $0/TB for that bandwidth.
| mmastrac wrote:
| CloudFlare has a good blog post on this, but effectively
| they pay for megabit/s capability.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Which is not that different from paying by the TB, as
| long as you are big enough that your traffic isn't too
| spiky. If you assume that over the day/week Cloudflare's
| your bandwidth usage moves between 0.5x and 1.5x of the
| monthly average, then paying for 1 TB/month is basically
| the same as paying for 4.5 megabit/s (1TB/month == 3Mb/s,
| multiply by 1.5 for peak demand).
| [deleted]
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Bandwidth is very cheap [1], cloud providers gouge. Cloudflare
| is using this product to disrupt other cloud providers and pull
| business from them.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682237
| foobiekr wrote:
| Yes basically. In networking everybody except for people
| living on a CSP buy bandwith/ports not bits moved. AWS egress
| is fabulously profitable specifically because they're ripping
| you off vs even a very expensive colo.
| cloudfalcon wrote:
| Hi, I'm LV, I wrote this post. I co-founded Taloflow to make
| choosing cloud vendors transparent and easy.
|
| I'm curious to hear what factors HN readers think I missed and if
| you think Cloudflare R2 will be a threat in the cloud object
| storage market place.
| mlyle wrote:
| What do you think of the above comment which indicates you
| overcounted B2's costs by a factor of 10,000?
| cloudfalcon wrote:
| They are right. We addressed the comment and fixed the
| article.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Removing egress is awesome
|
| > Except you can put R2 in front of S3 and set it to "slurp"
| mode. That way as objects are requested through the normal course
| of use they'll be stored in R2. You can then keep S3 as a backup,
| or delete the objects that have moved over. Being a proxy is
| cool.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28703464
|
| Note: I think it's pretty obvious that they are very pro AWS. I
| saw a lot of positive comments and very few negative comments
| here. Reading the blog post makes it look like it was the
| inverse.
| Thaxll wrote:
| I don't see excatly how the r2 model will be viable, you
| basically have a free CDN. I don't see that staying that way.
| DisjointedHunt wrote:
| You pay for storage. Only , not as much as what AWS charges.
|
| Cloudflare has a business model where they can basically handle
| any network load you throw at them.
|
| They are monetizing their advantage here by allowing you to
| make full use of their network as long as you make use of their
| paid storage as well.
|
| The margins in the cloud business and AWS especially are
| breathtakingly large and yet, considered affordable by
| enterprises so far because the alternative of standing up your
| own compute and networking capacity is not just significantly
| expensive, there just isn't enough talent available in the
| world to go around for every enterprise to have a decently
| staffed team doing so.
| Thaxll wrote:
| Cloudflare still has to pay for transit, so I don't see how
| hosting a 1GB video being served multi TB per month will work
| for them.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| Cloudflare have a great blog post about this:
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/
|
| The short answer is that at AWS/Cloudflare scale you're
| paying a fixed cost for networking capacity, not for
| transit per byte. So their cost doesn't scale anywhere near
| the way AWS egress costs do, and if they want it can just
| be free.
| DisjointedHunt wrote:
| Yup, precisely. They buy "capacity" ie the equivalent of
| making an infrastructure investment. AWS does the same.
|
| Now, AWS chooses to price their network usage as a
| utility, ie, you pay per unit of data transmitted. This
| is ridiculous for enterprise scale.
|
| Cloudflare uses their purchased capacity as a strategic
| differentiator by basically letting you use as much as
| you want because they have so much purchased, you
| wouldn't ever make a dent.
|
| Any services behind this differentiator are what they can
| charge for. Like I said above, the margins in cloud are
| ridiculously high. This is why these companies are
| amongst the few in the world valued over a Trillion
| dollars. Throw in an upstart who has the strategic
| advantage and technical competence that Cloudflare has
| and boy, do we have a winner . The next few years will be
| very interesting.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Seems like a person could create an unbelieving cheap podcast
| hosting business (Simplecast, Transistor.fm, etc) on the back of
| R2.
|
| For those unaware, the primary infrastructure cost of these
| businesses is serving up mp3.
|
| Much like what YouTube does for video.
| corobo wrote:
| I'm aiming to do exactly that with hosted.fm as it happens :)
|
| Using B2 and CF workers to keep costs low currently but if R2
| is as good as it sounds I have no reason to write any overages
| billing code. Lovely!
| klaaz0r wrote:
| Exactly this! with https://reason.fm I am going to try and see
| if I can migrate our services to R2, right now it's pretty
| doable with S3 or GCloud storage at scale but we can definitely
| get our costs down with R2!
| marcc wrote:
| IMO, the best feature Cloudflare added to R2 was the automatic
| migration. This makes sense for a CDN to offer, but if R2 works,
| this makes it pretty simple to migrate.
|
| "After specifying an existing storage bucket, R2 will serve
| requests for objects from the existing bucket,"
|
| I've Beene evaluating R2, but this migration path makes it dead
| simple to use. I just point my code to read/write from/to R2
| instead of S3, and I'll get egress fees from AWS during the
| migration, but then that's it?
| milesward wrote:
| insert doubt
| nawgz wrote:
| Why would you doubt it? Cloudfare is a legit company and a
| migration workflow like this does not sound like a feat of
| engineering to accomplish
| SteveNuts wrote:
| What part is OP missing?
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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?
| tuananh wrote:
| > Double paying for storage is still going to be cheaper
| than egress fees overall.
|
| because of this?
| starfallg wrote:
| Zero egress costs for assets is a very strong reason for
| people to move. For public assets, it's a complete no-
| brainer.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I kinda think people will use the S3 proxy feature of R2
| for that, which doesn't really move customers over.
| starfallg wrote:
| Then why not store it on Cloudflare itself and save on
| half the storage, plus less latency?
|
| Makes zero sense to keep public assets on S3 in this
| case. Only when you need ACL integration or glacier would
| S3 make sense.
| acdha wrote:
| It might be only part of your infrastructure but on many
| projects it's a significant fraction of your total
| expenditure _and_ storage egress is one of the things
| limiting use of external services. Having a cheap data
| access option makes it easy to reconsider those choices
| when you don't have to factor egress into the cost of
| trying an alternative.
| outworlder wrote:
| There are many applications that have no dependency on
| AWS at all, other than S3. This is one of the reasons
| projects like Minio exist.
|
| If you don't care and just need some blob storage, this
| could be great.
| deeblering4 wrote:
| 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.
| 5faulker wrote:
| I like Cloudflare for its CDN, but considering its competitors
| and migration effort I think that only time will tell.
| gopalv wrote:
| > I just point my code to read/write from/to R2 instead of S3
|
| This is probably worse for CloudFront than for S3 itself.
|
| Double paying for storage is still going to be cheaper than
| egress fees overall.
| marcc wrote:
| Good point about double paying for storage. There's a long
| migration problem here to clean up. Most of my buckets have
| some frequently and some very infrequently accessed objects.
| To address this, there needs to be some sort of an active
| migration tool? Does R2 have this built in?
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| I'm not sure exactly what you mean by active migration
| tool, but my understanding is that they copy objects from
| s3 to r2 on the first request. So if you have infrequently
| accessed objects they won't be copied and you won't be
| double paying storage until it's first requested.
| flak48 wrote:
| 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)
| marcc wrote:
| 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?
| tommoor wrote:
| hard same, the automatic migration is a big deal!
| TrueCarry wrote:
| 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 there's downtime? Does
| anybody use them and has opinion?
| dadrian wrote:
| Let's say you sell a data product that generates around 1TB per
| day, which is downloaded by every customer once. On AWS/GCP,
| that's roughly $80/day/customer in egress costs, which would make
| the minimum pricing of the data product $30K/year to break even
| SOLELY egress, assuming each customer only does the download
| once.
|
| It's basically not possible to offer something like this on AWS
| or GCP, you have to run your own server somewhere with flat
| bandwidth pricing. If I were still in the data business, I'd
| absolutely be moving everything to R2.
| bovermyer wrote:
| I'm surprised no one has mentioned Digital Ocean Spaces. The
| pricing is much simpler, even if it's more expensive for some
| scenarios.
| tlarkworthy wrote:
| It's missing IAM conditional policies so it's a no for me.
| xwdv wrote:
| At our company we're ready to convert to R2, and this will
| probably be the foot in the door to using other cloudflare
| services.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Personally I find Backblaze B2 more compelling.
|
| ... Ok, after writing that, I realized that I should probably
| look up R2's offering first. And then my jaw hit the floor at
| "free egress bandwidth".
|
| _Free egress bandwidth_? Yes please.
|
| I will instantly convert.
|
| Then I was worried about price per GB. $0.015/GB is incredibly
| competitive.
|
| Good lord, where do I get early access to this thing? I'd
| transition all our infra today.
| irrational wrote:
| Egress means files being requested, right? Is there a charge
| for sending files to the server (ingress)? Does this mean the
| only charge is the storage space?
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| This was one of the most surprising things, to me, before I
| learned about any of this stuff.
|
| inbound traffic (ingress) is free, almost universally.
|
| outbound traffic (egress) is $insane, almost universally.
|
| It's where most of the cloud providers make most of their
| money, as far as I can tell.
|
| I'm a fan of murdering egress fees, so therefore I am a fan
| of whatever Cloudflare R2 turns out to be. As long as they
| get rid of egress, I'll cheerlead them for life.
|
| (To answer your question more directly: "yes, I think so. At
| least in my experience.")
| jacurtis wrote:
| According to their press release it says:
|
| > That's why Cloudflare plans to eliminate egress fees, deliver
| object storage that is at least 10% cheaper than S3, and make
| infrequent access completely free for customers
|
| A few elements of concern. It says they "plan to", so we don't
| know if this is near term or some moonshot type of goal. It
| also states earlier in the press release that the free egress
| frees are offered via the "Bandwidth Alliance", which removes
| bandwidth charges between member providers. While it is
| noteworthy that GCP (Google Cloud Provider) and Microsoft Azure
| are part of this alliance, AWS is not! So does this mean that
| egress fees will be charged if an AWS server requests the file?
|
| I also don't know what to think about the statement that they
| plan to make infrequent access completely free... does that
| mean that I can throw files onto R2 for archive purposes and
| not pay anything? Because that is what it sounds like by that
| statement, but it obviously sounds impractical or too good to
| be true.
|
| Original Press Release: https://www.cloudflare.com/press-
| releases/2021/cloudflare-an...
| greg-m wrote:
| 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.
| jacurtis wrote:
| Ok, thanks for the clarification. After I wrote that
| statement about Infrequent Access, I was thinking about it
| more and realized that you probably pay for storage but
| simply have no access fees. In other words you don't really
| distinguish between storage tiers. I think that is good. S3
| technically has 7 storage tiers, with all permutations of
| limited availability zone, reduced redundancy, infrequent
| access, archival storage, etc. While it is understandable
| that archival storage is unique (it is tape storage), the
| others just seem arbitrary and unnecessary.
|
| I am an AWS administrator/architect for work so we are
| always trying to weigh pros and cons. AWS S3 is notoriously
| overpriced. This is a well-established fact. There are many
| other providers that offer comparable solutions (or even
| superior) such as the new R2. But we feel the effect of
| vendor lock-in because of S3's integration with other AWS
| services, which is what keeps a lot of people over-paying
| for S3. I think the auto-migration feature is potentially
| one of the best arguments for switching to R2.
|
| R2 is undeniably a better value than S3. S3 requires me to
| select a region and optionally even limit an availability
| zone (if I need to keep costs low). CDN/edge locations are
| all extra cost via AWS Cloudfront. And the reality is many
| people are already using Cloudflare as CDN in front of S3
| storage. So R2 just becomes a no-brainer at that point. I
| think it will be a successful launch. I am excited to try
| it.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Thanks! R2 coming out with $0 egress is somewhere between
| unbelievable and literal-miracle.
|
| I suppose my only skepticism is "but how fast can I
| egress?" -- if the bandwidth is 100x slower than GCP, it
| might dampen my enthusiasm a little bit. But honestly I'd
| still take a 100x slowdown if it means I can do long term
| archival without paying $200 just to download the data,
| soooo....
|
| Anyway, cheers, and thanks for doing impactful work!
| CameronNemo wrote:
| What is laarc?
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| (@CameronNemo: If you want to chat about it, you'll have
| to DM me on twitter. As you see, comments here about it
| are instakilled.)
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Will you be going after "abusive" hosts? Like if I wanted
| to use your services to deliver a successful podcast or a
| viral video I would be paying you pennies a month for
| storage, while taking up boatloads of bandwidth.
|
| I am not planing on doing either, but I am just curious
| what you would do about it?
| sodality2 wrote:
| If the requests /sec are over the free limit, you'd be
| charged.
| politician wrote:
| Hey Greg, I was just talking to Sales about R2 yesterday,
| and they said that it was not live yet. Can you clarify
| availability?
| Matheus28 wrote:
| I honestly can't see how it'd be profitable if someone were
| to host several TB worth of files that are very frequently
| downloaded. My fear with anything "free" is that once you
| actually use it A LOT, it will be pulled from under you.
| I'm a lot more comfortable with $0.001/GB than $0/GB.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _While it is noteworthy that GCP (Google Cloud Provider)
| and Microsoft Azure are part of this alliance, AWS is not! So
| does this mean that egress fees will be charged if an AWS
| server requests the file?_
|
| The bandwidth alliance means when Cloudflare requests a file
| from GCP, GCP won't charge you egress. Cloudflare will then
| deliver your file to your customer for free.
| bbu wrote:
| small correction: gcp will still charge you but at a
| reduced rate.
| spullara wrote:
| I think they mean the cost for access would be completely
| free (if not accessed much) but not the storage as those are
| separate fees.
| kaixi wrote:
| B2 to Cloudflare egress is free, they are both part of
| Bandwidth Alliance:
| https://www.backblaze.com/b2/solutions/content-delivery.html
| austinpena wrote:
| Answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28778286
| [deleted]
| hitekker wrote:
| B2 is also a lot slower egress than S3, by maybe an order of
| magnitude.
| true_religion wrote:
| OVH storage is $0.0112/GB and egress is just $0.01/GB. Having
| egressed priced out is handy because then you can just use it
| directly.
|
| With Cloudflare you'd have to pay for the CDN separately for
| any real traffic amount.
| forty wrote:
| We will see in practice how it is. As the article suggested,
| there are often caveats to "unlimited" and honestly I don't
| even think they have written unlimited anywhere :)
| fernandotakai wrote:
| >As the article suggested, there are often caveats to
| "unlimited" and honestly I don't even think they have written
| unlimited anywhere :)
|
| CF already talked about egress pricing here
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/
|
| i would say that when they talk unlimited, they actually mean
| it.
| forty wrote:
| Precisely my point is that I haven't seen "unlimited"
| mentioned either in the R2 announcement nor on your link.
| So it's not unlikely that it's going to be free egress up
| to X GB per month (possibly with X high enough that it's
| still cool)
| aclelland wrote:
| I think that when CF say unlimited bandwidth they really mean
| it. I manage a domain on the business level plan for a domain
| and I pushed over 1PB through it in January. Not a single
| complaint from CF and no sales calls pushing enterprise tier.
|
| They haven't clarified their file operations costs yet
| though. That could get pricy but will more than likely be
| cancelled out by the egress savings for most use cases.
| Aea wrote:
| Not saying your experience isn't true, but I've heard
| horror stories of accounts being disabled for using too
| much "non-HTML" bandwidth, even on business level
| ($200/month) accounts (at the single digit TB level). The
| limits seem to be arbitrary and ill defined.
|
| CF may be great technically, but I personally wouldn't use
| them without an enterprise agreement in place. Bandwidth
| should be cheap, but cheap does not equal free.
|
| Unless I had an enterprise agreement in place I'd rather
| work with a vendor that has a well defined usage-based
| pricing. I have a low appetite for risk, and usage-based
| pricing aligns incentives properly IMHO.
| corobo wrote:
| How long ago was that?
| Aea wrote:
| Came across these 3-4 years ago when I was doing research
| on whether CF would be viable for a previous company.
| breakingcups wrote:
| Yeah, that's why I haven't dared put them in front of my
| B2 buckets, even though they have the Bandwidth Alliance.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > I personally wouldn't use them without an enterprise
| agreement in place
|
| That would depend on the use case I'd assume.
| aclelland wrote:
| Yes, you are right that an enterprise agreement is
| probably the safest approach and it's definitely
| something we have looked into since the beginning of the
| year.
|
| In our case, one of our games DAU went pretty crazy last
| Christmas which resulted in a huge increase in players
| (who all need to download hundreds of MB of data). Maybe
| if it'd continued for many months the situation would be
| different and that angry email from CF would have
| eventually arrived.
| sydney6 wrote:
| Backblaze, IIRC, doesn't distribute data across multiple
| regions.
| [deleted]
| anyfactor wrote:
| I googled what egress meant.
|
| > when that data is retrieved from the cloud, providers will
| then charge large fees; this is what's known as a data egress.
|
| There are many cloud providers seem to be not charging for
| egress.
| the_duke wrote:
| No, most cloud providers do not charge for ingress, but
| charge heavily for egress.
| [deleted]
| anyfactor wrote:
| I didn't mention or didn't know what ingress is.
|
| The full excerpt [0]
|
| > Most leading cloud providers allow their customers to
| input data into the cloud for free. However, when that data
| is retrieved from the cloud, these providers will then
| charge large fees; this is what's known as a data egress.
|
| Here is what I found out about ingress [1]
|
| > Egress in the world of networking implies traffic that
| exits an entity or a network boundary, while Ingress is
| traffic that enters the boundary of a network.
|
| [0] https://wasabi.com/help/glossary-of-terms/egress-
| charges-def...
|
| [1] https://aviatrix.com/learn-center/cloud-
| security/egress-and-...
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| no worries, it was all quite confusing to me too. I never
| had to worry about any of this stuff till accidentally
| racking up a $600 charge in one day by using a TPU pod to
| train on data in the wrong region.
|
| Here's the rule of thumb:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28775836
|
| > inbound traffic (ingress) is free, almost universally.
|
| > outbound traffic (egress) is $insane, almost
| universally.
|
| so think of it like, teleport yourself to S3's servers.
| Any data that comes in, you charge $0. Any data that goes
| out, you charge $massive.
|
| This seems to be true for almost every provider I've
| found. Hetzner is one of the rare exceptions. If you need
| a server, get a Hetzner dedicated box, because it's
| unlimited traffic (both ingress and egress). It powers
| https://battle.shawwn.com/ (big dump of files).
|
| I'd love to store things in S3 or GCE, but it's a non-
| starter, because transferring between GCE to Hetzner
| would cost $0.12/GB downloaded. 12 cents per GB! It
| doesn't sound like a lot till you do the math on 22TB.
|
| Hence, R2 is incredibly appealing. I'd love $0.015 per GB
| storage cost + free egress, because it means I can
| download as much as I want to my hetzner server. Meaning,
| I don't need to worry about my hetzner drives failing.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Responding to a deleted but interesting comment. Normally I
| wouldn't do this, but it's harmless enough:
|
| > Backblaze B2 transfer to Cloudflare is free egress due to
| bandwidth alliance and Cloudflare CDN is free egress. So you
| already kinda have that.
|
| Hmm... What does it mean to transfer to Cloudflare? That's
| interesting.
|
| I want free egress to my Hetzner servers. (4x16TB for $79EU/mo
| is unbeatable, primarily because Hetzner also has unlimited
| free egress bandwidth.)
|
| But if Cloudflare offers servers, I should look into that. Do
| they? Even if they do, what's their egress pricing?
|
| Thanks for the tip!
|
| (I've been wondering about B2's mysterious "computing partners"
| -- their computing partners get free egress, so it seems
| entirely plausible that Cloudflare might be one such computing
| partner. I just didn't realize that Cloudflare might do
| computing at all -- in my head, they were a proxy, not a server
| farm.)
| DeathArrow wrote:
| They offer a serverless platform.
|
| If you want free egress, you can check Wasabi:
| https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/#three-info
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Wasabi charges for your largest file for 3 months.
|
| You only get "free" egress for the size of your storage.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Thanks for pointing this out!
| Polycryptus wrote:
| I've been using Wasabi for a project where cost is more
| important than anything (i.e. a side project with
| reasonable scale that can't accept income) and on that
| front it is great. (S3 costs have been atrociously high to
| us sometimes.) For CDN-type resources we do a Wasabi bucket
| with Cloudflare with caching set very high. Reliability has
| been the only problem; it's not awful by any means, but
| there are a lot more "hiccups" using it. You get what you
| pay for, I guess.
|
| That said I'm looking to see if just using R2 is a big
| improvement. It'll cost more but the reliability and
| performance might be worth it for us.
| Eugr wrote:
| Did you have a look at rstor.io? They have free egress and even
| lower storage costs and also don't seem to charge for IOPS. Not
| as high profile as Cloudflare though.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I haven't! Thank you for the tip!
| Smerity wrote:
| Thanks! I'd never seen them. The only minor catches that I've
| seen are that they want you to start the account with $50 or
| more added, it's $6 per TB per month (rounded up to the
| nearest TB) with a 90 day minimum duration, and you're
| allowed 1TB egress per day for each TB you have stored.
|
| They were also acquired very recently[2] though no clue how
| that might impact things.
|
| I'm fine with all those except the pre-loading $50 just to
| test, though that's as I want to test it personally. If I
| were using a business account that's not as much an issue.
|
| [1]: https://console.rstor.space/pricing
|
| [2]: https://www.yahoo.com/now/packetfabric-announces-
| acquisition...
| iptrans wrote:
| "you're allowed 1TB egress per day for each TB you have
| stored."
|
| Where did you find the reference to 1TB per day?
|
| On the page it says:
|
| "1 TB of data egress for every 1 TB storage capacity used"
|
| I would have assumed this is per month.
| Smerity wrote:
| You're right, I misread it and now can't edit my comment.
| This puts it all in quite a similar position to Wasabi[1]
| who have a 1:1 storage:transfer ratio per month and a 90
| day minimum storage duration as well. In fact, their
| price per terabyte is almost exactly the same ($5.99 for
| Wasabi vs $6 for Rstor).
|
| It's a shame as I love aspects of this type of storage
| service, even with the caveats, but they're not useful if
| there's no way to pay more for excess transfer. Luckily I
| think R2 fits that requirement (though paying for more
| operations vs paying for more transfer).
|
| [1]: https://wasabi.com/paygo-pricing-faq/
| Eugr wrote:
| That's interesting... When talking to their reps I
| mentioned Wasabi and asked if they have similar
| limitations and they said "no". I wonder if enterprise
| customers are treated differently?
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Also Wasabi is worth checking. Free egress cheap prices.
| https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/#three-info
| breakingcups wrote:
| If I recall correctly, that's only good up until the total
| storage. So if you store, say, 100GB of files total, you
| only have free egress up until 100GB/month
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Exactly... also, they have like a 3 month minimum storage
| time on a lot of their plans.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| Free egress is huge for my data pipeline workloads. I hate
| getting silo-ed into a single cloud provider, because my data
| lives there and it's too expensive to run the compute jobs on
| another cloud due to the cost of moving the data.
|
| For example GCP has a much better Kubernetes offering than AWS,
| but everything's native to S3. So you get stuck using crappier
| products. If R2 offered free egress, I'd move the entire data
| lake there just to sidestep this problem.
| mattjaynes wrote:
| As mentioned in another comment, don't forget to consider B2's
| weekly 2 hour maintenance windows during the US work day:
| https://www.backblaze.com/scheduled-maintenance.html
| nvahalik wrote:
| This was the reason we ended up moving away from B2. It may
| be durable but their storage isn't a drop-in replacement for
| S3 or similar products. They are really an S3-compatible
| target for backup softwares.
| mattjaynes wrote:
| In any comparisons with B2, don't forget to consider that they
| have a 2 hour maintenance window every Thursday during the US
| business day: https://www.backblaze.com/scheduled-
| maintenance.html
|
| They usually don't go down during that time, but sometimes they
| do and their support told us to always expect outages during this
| time.
|
| If you need your B2 data available during those windows, you'll
| need to also set up a failover data source for those times.
| res0nat0r wrote:
| The lower egress fees are super nice, but until someone can beat
| the Glacier Deep Archive pricing @ $0.00099 per GB I'm going to
| keep using that.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| That's not for data you Will actually use. You are only
| including one of the many cysts ( egress and retrieval) + it's
| really slow.
|
| Cloudflare brings R2 to the edge.
| smorgusofborg wrote:
| Integration is an interesting problem though. With Scaleway's
| c14 cold storage, I felt the reasonable choices were use
| their S3 services for more or don't use their S3 oriented
| archive service at all. Moving everything around to different
| S3 services for different purposes seems like something I
| don't want to sign up for.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Apples to oranges. Glacier Deep Archive and R2 (And really, all
| the other S3 tiers) serve entirely different use cases.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| "Archive"
|
| Archive is great for archiving. S3 standard tier is not for
| archiving.
| res0nat0r wrote:
| My #1 concern is total monthly cost to store data, that's it.
| capableweb wrote:
| Then R2 is worse for you than S3 as the entire point of R2
| seems to be to do a different tradeoff than S3. You pay
| more for total storage but less for bandwidth with R2, and
| vice-versa for S3.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Where did you get that from? R2 is cheaper for storage
| too then s3
| breakingcups wrote:
| Then your #2 concern should be "when will I want to access
| this data I store? How much of it? And how quickly?"
| because that's where Glacier can cost you a new house or
| car.
|
| So for backups, stuff you don't need often (AND don't need
| to restore quickly), it's fine. Not so for most other use-
| cases.
| kondro wrote:
| Great pricing, but a 48 hour retrieval window sucks for
| everything except things you basically never need to retrieve.
|
| I'm not even talking backups here, if you need a backup at all,
| you probably need it ASAP. This is a governance product.
| electroly wrote:
| You do have the option for 12 hour retrieval; 48 hour is the
| discount restore option. We keep the latest backup in the
| Standard tier and use GDA for older backups.
| [deleted]
| jeffalo wrote:
| The name Cloudflare R2 is incredible.
|
| The letter before S is R. The number before 3 is 2.
| Shadonototra wrote:
| it won't, it still is over priced compared to its real cost
|
| at best it makes it a compelling alternative, but the story ends
| here
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