[jacurtis]

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]

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]

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.

[rsync]

"I am an AWS administrator/architect for work so we are always trying to weigh pros and cons."

Very informal survey ... but I wonder if you are familiar with the 'rclone' tool:

https://rclone.org/

... just curious ...

[sillysaurusx]

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!

[mst]

> R2 coming out with $0 egress is somewhere between unbelievable and literal-miracle.

Not necessarily.

A nearlyfreespeech noted when they changed to a charge-by-incoming-bandwidth model, links are still often bought symmetrically and for them the thing that eats the most bandwidth is incoming DDoS attacks, not legitimate traffic.

It seems to me that Cloudflare are likely to be in this situation except even more so.

[sillysaurusx]

(@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.)

[Matheus28]

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.

[prirun]

At high request volumes there would be a per-operation charges, so not exactly free.

Backblaze (the consumer thing, not B2) has always had unlimited backups, and still does. One of their execs (Brian) posted a graph showing a backup space utilization histogram for all customers in 2018. The first few data points are:

30% use <100GB 15% use <200GB 9% use <300GB ...

So ~55% of their customers are using <300GB and paying $6/mo. On B2, their cloud storage product, $6 will buy 1.2TB of storage. Way more than half of their unlimited customers are paying 4x more for unlimited storage than they would if they paid for metered storage.

Interestingly, on that same histogram, are the last 2 customers: one using 293TB and one using 430TB. While IMO they are misusing the service, they are also an extreme minority. If that last guy was paying for that space with B2, it would cost $2150/month. Backblaze has said they just don't care. Now if it were half their users doing it, of course they would.

I can tell you one thing: R2 with free bandwidth is going to be a gift for the porn industry!

[mst]

My guess is that carrier grade links are generally symmetrical and cloudflare's provisioning requirements are driven by incoming DDoS traffic, which makes the economics quite different than they would be otherwise.

[politician]

Hey Greg, I was just talking to Sales about R2 yesterday, and they said that it was not live yet. Can you clarify availability?

[judge2020]

> R2 is currently under development... We’ll be announcing an open beta where any user will be able to sign up for the service soon.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2-object-storage/#:...

In my opinion, expect 3-6 months for the beta, then maybe 2 years for GA. Storage at scale isn't easy, especially if they want to be comparable to aws in speed, SLA, data protection (ie. duplicated to 3+ physical data silos), etc.

[GordonS]

Sorry to side track things, but I have a somewhat related Cloudflare question!

I'm using Azure, rather than AWS, and I hope R2 is available for Azure eventually too.

In the mean time, I came across a Cloudflare blog post from earlier this year that said you can use Azure's preferred routing feature to point to Cloudflare, which will result in "substantially cheaper" egress bandwidth fees. Sounded good, but when I looked at Azure's bandwidth pricing it looks like egress routed through Cloudflare is barely any cheaper, only 9% or so :(

The question: am I missing something, or is that paltry reduction really all Azure is doing?

[stavros]

This is rather offtopic, but what's with your documentation "code" fields being uncopiable? Those are the exact fields I need to copy!

E.g. https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections...

[selcuka]

Wow, that's really weird. They seem to have specifically disabled it. You can use the userscript I just made for myself [1] as a workaround for now.

https://gist.github.com/selcuk/90ce1ce8b8d46c869efd6da24cde1...

[stavros]

It is really weird, yeah, expecially since the examples seem to be meant to be copied. Thanks for the script!

[7ewis]

Not sure if it's been fixed, but works fine for me using Brave on Mac.

[spurgu]

Same, same, same & same. :D

[tomjen3]

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]

If the requests /sec are over the free limit, you'd be charged.

[nemothekid]

>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]

small correction: gcp will still charge you but at a reduced rate.

[GordonS]

Do you know how much the discount is? I was looking into this regarding Azure just yesterday, but it looks like they only discount the egress bandwidth by a pitiful 9% or so.

[spullara]

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.