[snowwrestler]

The R2 disruption is a reduction in cost. The target of the disruption is Amazon, a company that has decades of experience operating services at break-even or loss to acquire market share.

Quite a lot of the coverage seems founded on the idea that the price difference is an unbridgeable moat for Cloudflare. IMO, let’s see. Amazon could lower prices, and/or Cloudflare might need to start charging someone something as volume grows.

[nightpool]

If Amazon has to remove egress fees to compete, wouldn't that be a pretty significant disruption to the industry as well? The author's argument isn't that Cloudflare is going to take S3 out of business, it's that removing egress fees makes a whole new class of applications viable. I don't see how the S3 removing egress fees as well would change that argument—it would still be Cloudflare that pushed the storage industry to this new place. In fact, S3 having to remove egress fees to compete would be probably be greater evidence for Cloudflare's disruptive effect :P

[wpietri]

This definitely isn't a disruption in the academic sense of the term: https://hbr.org/2015/12/what-is-disruptive-innovation

But even in the casual sense I don't think it's disruptive. They've introduced a competing service at a modestly lower cost. This won't put AWS out of business. Customers won't switch away en masse. It even won't make a noticeable dent in AWS's quarterly revenues.

So this isn't disruption. it's bog-standard business competition. Which I very much welcome.

[x0x0]

It's more than modestly lower though in some use cases.

https://twitter.com/quinnypig/status/1443028078196711426

Corey compares the cost of storing 1gb of data in s3 vs r2 and serving it to the internet:

> If 1 million people download that 1GB this month, my cost with @cloudflare R2 this way rounds up to 13¢. With @awscloud S3 it’s [$53,891.16]

[wpietri]

Who do you see as current AWS customers paying bills like that? My guess is that's very niche. People who expect to use petabytes of bandwidth rarely just throw things on AWS and eat the bills. And if they do, then it sounds like they wouldn't be moved to switch anyhow.

[x0x0]

Not current aws customers, but a friend's company basically built out their own cdn to avoid these charges. They're something like twitch -- lots of videos, lots of viewers.

Paying a fraction (there will obviously be charges beyond the $.09) but still a fraction of aws charges would have been revolutionary for them.

[wpietri]

I think most people in that bucket knows not to serve in bulk from AWS and so just use existing CDNs. (Or, as you say, builds their own.) A good fraction of Cloudflare's business has to be fronting things that are in AWS.

For this to be disruptive, there has to be a significant amount of business that will move from AWS to Cloudflare because of this change.

[NicoJuicy]

I think you are underestimating what it could do when they have a complete cloud offering.

And since there are no egress fees, there is no barrier to use a competing product that does something better.

It's like they are launching without vendor lock-in. So I do think it's disruptive, not based on costs alone.

[wpietri]

If they ever get a complete cloud offering, that might be disruptive. But I don't think this is disruptive now. If you do, please be specific about the customer segments you think will be switching over the next 6 months and what your estimated impact is to AWS's $15 billion in quarterly revenue.

[NicoJuicy]

I think you didn't totally read my comment.

No more vendor lock-in because of removal of egress fees. Means they can actually obtain the first-mover advantage and they don't really need a complete offering.

I can't say that i know the impact on AWS in only 6 months. No one can, so they question seems somewhat ridiculous, since it's too little time.

+ The global cloud market is still growing.

[wpietri]

I did read it, thanks.

That you can't see any short-term impact is exactly my point. Nothing significant will change, so this is not a disruptive innovation. It's a minor incremental change in the market. Might it enable something disruptive down the road? Possibly. But that's possible, not actual. If you want to more about what disruptive means in this context, I'd suggest reading one of Clay Christensen's books or the article I linked up above.

[NicoJuicy]

I'm mostly talking about significant impact on AWS ( revenue) within 6 months. Which is not realistic in that time frame.

I see a way for cloudflare to innovate based on dropping egress fees. But I'm not sure if i can drop my hunch this early. I think i can wrap it up with " empowering open-source".

I'll see if the future unravels in that direction. There are additional products required for that path to fulfill and I think a 6 month timeline is kinda short for that.