[abhv]

Very generous offer from Cloudflare. I signed up.

The main question: how can Cloudflare make this into a sustainable business?

* cost/gb is cheaper or same as s3, gcp, azure

* no egress charges to customers, but they still have to pay for transit when they cross an AS!

what is the hidden angle Cloudfare is using here?

[wongarsu]

Cost/GB is three times that of Backblaze, bandwith is generally too cheap to meter (outside aws, gcp, azure who use egress costs for lock-in).

The offer is no doubt competitively prized, but it's no doubt much more lucrative than people using Cloudflare as a CDN for their s3/b2/azure/whatever.

[drip-egg-jack]

You need to account IO load as well, more bandwidth means more requests to the disks and I assume they will use mechanical HDDs for the storage, SSDs are still too expensive to support $0.015/GB. Good mechanical drive can give you up to 200 IOPS and maybe 200MB/s, so they will have to copy the data a lot to be able to increase capacity on demand. Making it free doesn't seems to be sustainable at all.

[NicoJuicy]

I don't know/think there is a hidden angle.

Eg. What could be the hidden angle of providing domains at cost ( which they do).

I think it's a matter of having a more complete cloud suite and expanding their portfolio while gaining market share.

Clarification: I don't think they do this at cost. Just cheaper than the big 3.

[abhv]

I suspect the story is a bit more complicated.

They seem to learn a lot by centralizing a lot of the internet's traffic through their core. Perhaps it makes their ddos-protection more robust when they can train on "what normal usage" looks like "for the longer tail".

Perhaps they are building moats around that business and expecting a future when Fortune1000 requires their cdn.

[NicoJuicy]

I don't think that's correct.

Their CDN is based on their SDN. Which is also at the core of all their products, including DDOS protection.

Their primary product is the SDN and a CDN was a logical pick as first product "release".

Eg. You shouldn't consider their products in "regions" as traditional cloud providers. In cloudflare it's programmable, not configurable.

[manigandham]

Cloudflare is already providing free egress to object storage hosted elsewhere (like B2). Now they can handle the storage too and charge you for it.

It's a net gain, with a storage price higher than B2 or Wasabi, and also moves your data to their platform for more ecosystem lock-in.

[irq-1]

> they still have to pay for transit when they cross an AS!

That's their advantage -- a global network that only exits to the local AS.

[ithkuil]

> no egress charges to customers, but they still have to pay for transit when they cross an AS!

Can somebody TL;DR what does being member of the "bandwidth alliance" mean?

[NicoJuicy]

> what does being member of the "bandwidth alliance" mean?

Cloud providers normally have huge profits on egress data ( outgoing) and not incoming data ( to attract giving them your data).

This additionally incentives customers to stay within a certain cloud and not using competing products based on costs ( since egress costs to a 3rd party makes the price difference obsolete)

Cloudflare ( i think) started the bandwidth alliance to make these prices more fair. As in: work together, have direct network connections and reduce customer billing.

AWS didn't want to join as they are n°1 currently: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/