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.
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.