[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 ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-10-06 23:00 UTC)