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.
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.
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]
Paying a fraction (there will obviously be charges beyond the $.09) but still a fraction of aws charges would have been revolutionary for them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not a single innovation could.
That's still quite the stretch. A pricing update to not charge egress fees for object storage and some types of streaming is hardly "disruptive", as is catering to the web3 buzzword.
I like Cloudflare, but these marketing blurbs start to eat away the goodwill that Cloudflare's technical progresses earn with their hard and quality work.
Hum. Do you think the largest cloud providers can outcompete that without completely changing their business plans?
Egress costs are always described as the ultimate cloud moat, and the main way those companies lock their clients. I do think there is enough space to disagree here (personally, I have no idea), but the mainstream view is that it fits the (econ-)dictionary definition of disruptive.
They are competing everywhere CDN, Zero Trust / EdgeSec, Edge Computing, Hosting, etc...
Anyone can think of any good historical good case studies on companies doing this in the past? Like becoming oversaturated, not focusing on one thing enough, or just growing like wild fire across spaces?
Also, they make quite smart choices. An example of one very smart choice is that they don't do Docker for cloud computation, only Javascript/WebASM, and that means they can spin up code in Isolates in V8 that's much more lightweight than having all the infra needed to do Docker.
Cloud egress costs are the primary lock-in mechanism for cloud providers and that's been recognized as such for many years. This isn't the kind of thing which changes an industry in less than a week but I doubt you will want to defend this claim a year from now — Cloudflare is an established, rather popular company which many large organizations already trust and this gave them either significant savings or a big negotiating crowbar.
Not completely: if you used a ton of bandwidth (especially non-HTML/JSON) they'd want you to switch to a paid plan.
Using an arbitrary origin server is similarly different, too: that means a lot more traffic coming back to your origin server unless all of your clients are located right next to each other hitting the same edge node. The mechanism they built to do an on-demand copy from S3 to R2 once and serve all subsequent requests from the replicated R2 copy should use substantially less bandwidth and will be faster for all of the requests received from clients which are closer to one of the R2 replicas than your origin server.
Only for HTML content. [1] That is the real disruption here.
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You wouldn't call it impressive if you had to wait >24h for a support response as a user with an enterprise package. I'd call it quite the opposite from my experience with them at my previous job.
And no they didnt disrupted anything. You dont disrupt anything in one week actually. Has R2 had any impact on S3 business model or customers so far ? Probably not.
Not saying Cloudflare is a bad company, I believe it is one of the few (maybe with Stripe) that is able to still work as a startup even though they have thousands of employees, which is quite impressive. But the article is clickbait