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Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by dwild on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @02:06PM (#28685659)
> So if R2 is S3 with no egress, suddenly there is a value proposition again.

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.

Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by loxias on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @03:37PM (#28686550)
B2 charges for egress, $0.01/GB. More interesting to me is Wasabi, which charges ~$0.006/GB*month and no egress fees at all.
Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by anderspitman on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @04:58PM (#28687414)
Wasabi egress is free, but they "reserve the right to limit or suspend your service"[0] if it doesn't fit the usage patterns they've designed for.

[0]: https://wasabi.com/paygo-pricing-faq/#free-egress-policy

Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by loxias on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @06:17PM (#28688148)
Huh, thanks for that. I hadn't noticed (was that always there??). So, sustained egress at rate R/sec means I have to use 2500000 * R amount of storage per month, hrm...

Possibly can't use it for one of the "ponies" I was working on, but probably still good as "ye huge media archive".

Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by 35mm on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @04:09PM (#28686913)
Wasabi doesn’t charge for egress (‘fair use’ policy applies), but they do have a 3 month minimum for data, including deleted data.

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.

Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by mwambua on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @06:17PM (#28688149)
B2 doesn't charge for egress to Cloudflare. (https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/)
Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by loxias on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @06:23PM (#28688199)
(stupid question) What does that get me? Does Cloudflare have cheap VMs I can rent with competitive prices? (including data egress fees?)

For object storage that I play with, some clients are in the cloud, with most sitting at home behind residential internet.

Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by jauer on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @06:30PM (#28688253)
(approximately) Cloudflare provides a proxy service that you'd use to access your B2 data from home or other cloud without paying for egress.

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.

Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by dan15 on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @11:29PM (#28690006)
Note that you can't use a free Cloudflare account just for things like images, video and other binary files, as they'll suspend the account. It must be used primarily for a website, not content hosting. If you only want to use Cloudflare for files, you need a paid account.
Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by chx on Thursday September 30, 2021 @12:18AM (#28703132)
Nope, eastdakota confirmed it's fine as a b2 image proxy right here on HN.
Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by mkl on Thursday September 30, 2021 @06:50AM (#28704921)
Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by mwambua on Thursday September 30, 2021 @01:01PM (#28708518)
Looking at his response, it seems like that's only true if you use workers... which you will end up paying for.
Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by chx on Friday October 01, 2021 @05:08PM (#28723393)
Five dollars a month, fixed, yes. fortepan.hu does this, it's a few terabytes of Hungarian historic photos. The site couldn't exist as it does now without Cloudflare essentially donating the bandwidth.
Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by mwambua on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @07:05PM (#28688498)
In addition, you need to use Cloudflare web workers if you want any sort of access controls. (I think this is part of why it makes financial sense for Cloudflare to do this)
Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by loxias on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @06:50PM (#28688383)
Wow! Cool! Very surprised that Cloudflare wouldn't charge an arm and a leg for such a service... considering they're moving the actual bits.

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.

Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by OJFord on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @07:30PM (#28688671)
'bandwidth alliance'

As far as I recall it's not a service or even any setting you have to set up, just a sort of policy.

Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by loxias on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @08:07PM (#28688903)
"Bandwidth Alliance" seems to be some sort of B2B consortium.

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 :/

Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by tomnipotent on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @10:09PM (#28689542)
> there's not a easy/inexpensive method for me to sign up and join the "bandwidth alliance"

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).

Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by danielheath on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @08:56PM (#28689194)
If you setup a free cloudflare proxy fronting your B2 bucket, then download from that, the egress from B2 is free because it's going to cloudflare and the egress from cloudflare is free because they don't charge for it.
Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by OJFord on Wednesday September 29, 2021 @03:57AM (#28691307)
> there's not a easy/inexpensive method for me to sign up and join the "bandwidth alliance"

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.

Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by OJFord on Wednesday September 29, 2021 @07:10AM (#28692247)
'its'*, sorry I can't notice that and leave it, even if I've missed the edit window!

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...

Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by dwild on Wednesday September 29, 2021 @12:27PM (#28695986)
Oh yeah, I mixed ingress with egress.

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.

Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by znpy on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @03:33PM (#28686510)
Frankly, backblaze looks like an over-specialized player whereas clouflare is already used for a lot of stuff.

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...

Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by dx034 on Thursday September 30, 2021 @04:37AM (#28704293)
Backblaze has only two locations and they cannot be used with the same account. Your data is (within one account) always just in California oder Amsterdam. For many needs, having multiple PoPs is crucial.
Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by atYevP on Thursday September 30, 2021 @02:53PM (#28709795)
Yev from Backblaze here -> we have more than two data center locations, but we do have two regions (US-West, which is spread out across California and Arizona and EU-Central which is in Amsterdam). Slight nuance, but very different!
Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by dx034 on Friday October 01, 2021 @07:28AM (#28717053)
You're right, but for me as a customer it doesn't matter. I can choose from two geographical locations and cannot use both at once with one account. So there's no option to get data close to my users.
Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by mcdevilkiller on Friday October 01, 2021 @09:41AM (#28718301)
You can front it with Cloudflare's CDN for free.
Re:Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage,... by dx034 on Tuesday October 05, 2021 @07:20AM (#28757908)
You're not allowed to use Cloudflare to just serve files, at least not in free/cheap tiers.