That doesn't appear to be what they're doing, they don't seem to have changed their existing operating model at all:
> R2 will zero-rate infrequent storage operations under a threshold — currently planned to be in the single digit requests per second range. Above this range, R2 will charge significantly less per-operation than the major providers. Our object storage will be extremely inexpensive for infrequent access and yet capable of and cheaper than major incumbent providers at scale.
What I read this as is "we won't bill you until your traffic spikes, then you'll pay us, oh how you'll pay us"
Transparent bandwidth pricing would be a far more interesting announcement. This is the second post I've seen from CloudFlare in recent months throwing bricks at AWS over bandwidth pricing, while failing to mention CloudFlare bandwidth is some of the most expensive available.
The announcement says that they're eliminating bandwidth charges three times.
I don't know the whole economics around cloud storage and bandwidth so maybe this is unrealistic pricing and your suspicions are well founded. However, Backblaze seems is offering storage at $0.005/GB and bandwidth at $0.01/GB. Cloudflare is charging 3x more than Backblaze for the storage and $0 for the bandwidth. Given that Cloudflare's costs are probably lower than Backblaze for bandwidth, that doesn't seem so unreasonable - but I could be very wrong.
I think Cloudflare probably sees R2 as something that is sustainable, but creates demand for their enterprise products. You start The NextBigThing with R2 and suddenly your application servers are under attack. You have a relationship with Cloudflare, you're used to their control panel, you trust them, and when you're at the scale that you're getting attacked like this you can drop $10,000/mo because you're bringing in a bunch of revenue - $10,000/mo is less than 1 software engineer in the US.
R2, in a certain way, can be a marketing tool. "Come use our S3 competitor with free bandwidth rather than getting locked into AWS's transfer pricing." 6-12 months go by and you're substantially larger and want more complex stuff and you're already getting emails from Cloudflare about their other offerings, you see them in the control panel, etc.
It seems like Cloudflare might be trying to move in on AWS's market. R2 is an easy way for them to do it. It seems like S3 has high margins. Competing storage services can be a fraction of the cost per GB and AWS's bandwidth markup is incredibly high. If you're looking to attack a competitor's market, it seems like going after one of their highest-margin product could make the most sense. Again, R2 becomes a marketing tool for future cloud offerings.
Part of Cloudflare's strategy might be targeting things that they see very high margins on and being willing to accept lower margins. If something has 50% margins and you're willing to accept 20% margins, you're still doing pretty great. Plus, over time, the cost of hardware comes down and you can keep your prices at the same level once people are happily inside your ecosystem and don't want to deal with migrations.
> CloudFlare bandwidth is some of the most expensive available
It sounds like you might have gotten burned by something with Cloudflare. I don't have any horror stories, but I'm always interested in new data points if you have them.
At scale, bandwidth capacity purchases are symmetric - you buy the same amount up as you do down. As a provider of DDOS protection services, Cloudflare has to maintain a huge amount of ingress capacity - meaning they have a ton of egress capacity sitting unused.
Isn't B2 from Backblaze already filling that need? I means more choice is always better for sure, but considering R2 goal seems really to be a CDN more than a backup space and it does feel like their money maker is in the CDN part, not the storage part... I feel like trusting them to store it long-term without using the CDN part is a little bit risky.
[0]: https://wasabi.com/paygo-pricing-faq/#free-egress-policy
Possibly can't use it for one of the "ponies" I was working on, but probably still good as "ye huge media archive".
This caught me out when I was transferring 100GB files that only needed to be up for a few hours, and I ended up getting charged as if I had hosted them for 3 months.
For object storage that I play with, some clients are in the cloud, with most sitting at home behind residential internet.
They can do this because it costs almost nothing to move data between B2 and Cloudflare, and then from Cloudflare to almost anywhere. Moving data from B2 to most other places on the internet likely costs them more because Backblaze isn't in a position to negotiate adventagous peering agreements with ISPs.
I'm poking around at the Cloudflare website, what's the name of the aforementioned service? What term should I google?
I'm ignorant of "modern Cloudflare" -- other than reading their fantastic technical blog, I've never used them in a professional capacity and don't know their product offering -- other than a cache, CDN, DDOS protection, and a Lambda.
As far as I recall it's not a service or even any setting you have to set up, just a sort of policy.
I'll dig into this more later, but unless I'm missing something obvious (I very well might be...) there's not a easy/inexpensive method for me to sign up and join the "bandwidth alliance", so that data transfer from B2 to my laptop is free.
I have a few VPSs with Linode, which is a member of the "Bandwidth Alliance" but I don't see any details, numbers, prices, specs... Just a bunch of marketing :/
Not unless you run a data center and intend to peer with other bandwidth providers to join your intranet to the internet. It's intended for large service providers like Cloudflare/Backblaze that do direct bandwidth interconnect at physical locations and don't have to involve other intermediaries (like Level 3) to move data between members.
Otherwise you "join" by hosting services/content with an Alliance member and making sure you only use other services that do the same. Even then, bandwidth isn't always free (Azure and GCP still have some costs, for example, but discounted).
As I said, you don't have to. As far as I recall you just use two 'B's in the 'B2B consortium' and it's policy applies to you.
To make this comment a bit less useless though, all you have to do is something like this: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666928-Using...
Weirdly they don't advertise it there.
More info here:
> the Bandwidth Alliance is a group of forward-thinking cloud and networking companies that are committed to discounting or waiving data transfer fees for shared customers.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/backblaze-b2-and-the-s3-compatib...
Now though I don't understands the original comment... why care about egress for backup storage? I means as long as it's not absurd (and I agree that AWS egress price is absurd, though the original comment wasn't complaining of that...), you usually don't expect to have to retrieve it and if required, you are ready to pay much more for it as it will be worth it.
Eg: my employer already has stuff on clouflare, using their services is just as easy as pulling their terraform provider. OTOH, for backblaze, I'd have to go through the whole evaluation process, security and legal compliance etc etc...
Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but the data does pass through the machine where rclone is running. rclone does support remote-to-remote transfers[0], but I believe only for remotes of the same type (ie S3 to S3).
Unless those providers natively supported this functionality (and they're incentivized to not) you'd _need_ an intermediary.
For the longest time we tried to convince people that they should have an off-amazon archive of their S3 data ... we even ran an ads to that effect in 2012[1].
The (obvious) reason this isn't compelling is the cost of egress. It's just (relatively) too expensive to offload your S3 assets to some third party on a regular basis.
So if R2 is S3 with no egress, suddenly there is a value proposition again.
Further, unlike in 2012, in 2021 we have really great tooling in the form of 'rclone'[2][3] which allows you to move data from cloud to cloud without involving your own bandwidth.
[1] The tagline was "Your infrastructure is on AWS and your backups are on AWS. You're doing it wrong."
[2] https://rclone.org/
[3] https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/rclone.html