[HN Gopher] Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for ch...
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       Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump change
        
       In their official example, 300PB for $104. Cloudflare only charge
       for the cost of GET operations. Actual "bandwidth" is free. For
       comparison, Amazon S3 is $90/TB. So, the equivalent cost would be
       300,000TB x $90= $27 million.  What is the catch? Am I missing
       something?  https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/platform/pricing/
        
       Author : truetraveller
       Score  : 29 points
       Date   : 2022-10-25 20:55 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
       | CherryJimbo wrote:
       | You would almost certainly have to be paying for an ENT agreement
       | before you got anywhere close to 300PB of traffic, which would
       | incur bandwidth fees.
       | 
       | It'd still be significantly less than $27 million though.
        
       | verisimilitudes wrote:
        
         | RockRobotRock wrote:
         | Do you think that's a little too dramatic? Cloudflare took down
         | 8chan and Kiwi Farms, and while the centralization of the web
         | does scare me, I think you're being silly here.
        
         | cvwright wrote:
         | Pretty sure AWS offers that feature too
        
         | hugboxie wrote:
        
       | outworlder wrote:
       | See also: https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/
       | 
       | Vendors listed there have pretty competitive pricing for
       | bandwidth.
       | 
       | I find many AWS services to be priced decently (if you are using
       | them properly, elastically scaling, etc). But that's definitely
       | not the case for bandwidth. AZ to AZ charges are one of the worst
       | - yes that's cheaper than egress but that's no consolation
       | because you are essentially required to use multiple AZs if your
       | business actually has any availability requirements.
       | 
       | And don't get me started on NAT Gateway pricing...
        
       | Matheus28 wrote:
       | AWS overcharges extremely for bandwidth. But yes, I'd expect that
       | much bandwidth to cost at least around $1m on most providers. If
       | you end up using THAT much bandwidth with so few GET requests,
       | expect a call from CloudFlare.
        
       | ignoramous wrote:
       | > _What is the catch? Am I missing something?_
       | 
       | Some say, Cloudflare throws the ToS rule-book at you once you
       | cross 5TB/mo (or whatever the threshold is; we're at multiple-TBs
       | but no one from Cloudflare has thrown as much as an email at us).
       | I mean, look no further than the absurd bandwidth rates they
       | charge for Specturm (their L4 load balancer) [0].
       | 
       | Pretty recently, Cloudflare blogged about AWS' potential 80x
       | markup on egress [1]. That is, the $90/TB AWS charges must cost
       | them a measly $1 or so.
       | 
       | Cloudflare in 2014 blogged about how they work relentlessly to
       | bring down bandwidth costs by peering aggressively where possible
       | [2] (which apparently means $0 for _unlimited_ bandwidth [3]).
       | And where they can 't / don't [4], egress is 5x (est) the ingress
       | (one pays for the higher among the two), but this creates an
       | opportunity for an arbitrage and give away DDoS protection for
       | free.
       | 
       | This is pretty similar to Amazon's free-shipping offer for
       | _Prime_ customers despite it being one of the biggest costs to
       | their retail business. _Prime_ basically has since forced Amazon
       | to bring down costs by building vast distribution and logistics
       | network that spawns the globe; and this was super expensive in
       | the short-run, but in the long run, it has become an unbreachable
       | moat around its largest business.
       | 
       | Analysts like Ben Thompson (stratechery.com) and Matthew Eash
       | (hhhypergrowth.com) have written in detail about Cloudflare's
       | modus operandii over the years, with both agreeing that
       | Cloudflare's model is so brilliantly disruptive that even Clayton
       | Christensen would be proud of it.
       | 
       | [0] $1/GB! https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-
       | us/articles/36004172187...
       | 
       | [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/
       | 
       | [2] https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-
       | bandwidth-a...
       | 
       | [3] https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/
       | 
       | [4] https://bgpview.io/asn/13335#info
        
       | supermatt wrote:
       | I really like the idea of using R2, but it seems like theres no
       | real protection against losing EVERYTHING should a write-enabled
       | key get leaked? On S3, I would be able to set a versioned bucket
       | and prevent deletions, for example.
       | 
       | What are others using R2 for? A "cached" version of your s3
       | buckets? Im assuming I could set up something like that with
       | workers?
        
         | vlovich123 wrote:
         | You don't even need to set it up by hand. Cache Reserve is the
         | way to put Cloudflare's CDN with a persistent cache in front of
         | your origin (which could be an S3 bucket). It's a 1 button
         | config thing.
         | 
         | If you use Worker bindings, then there's no write-enabled keys.
         | It's a fair critique obviously and the team is aware of some of
         | the product gaps. We only just launched GA :).
        
       | tiernano wrote:
       | You are missing the class b charges. Total would be $234.90 which
       | is still slightly less than 27 million...
        
         | vlovich123 wrote:
         | On the other hand, if you enable Cache in front of your bucket,
         | then your class B requests probably go back down to very
         | little...
        
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       (page generated 2022-10-25 23:01 UTC)