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Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump change

In their official example, 300PB for $104. Cloudflare only charge for the cost of GET operations. Actual "bandwidth" is free. For comparison, Amazon S3 is $90/TB. So, the equivalent cost would be 300,000TB x $90= $27 million.

What is the catch? Am I missing something?

https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/platform/pricing/

( 30 comments | 3 points | on HN )
Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by tiernano on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @05:42PM (#33336548)
You are missing the class b charges. Total would be $234.90 which is still slightly less than 27 million...
Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by vlovich123 on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @06:48PM (#33337230)
On the other hand, if you enable Cache in front of your bucket, then your class B requests probably go back down to very little...
Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by truetraveller on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @08:33PM (#33338159)
No, I included Class B charges. Writes are Class A, reads are Class B. That additional $130 is for 1PB of writes per day! Crazy, I know. So $104 + $130 = $234.
[dead]
Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by hugboxie on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @06:31PM (#33337033)
More like, if you have a contact who used to work at Google and knows network engineers all over the industry, you can have him put pressure via various back channels, to have a site taken down that is hosting embarrassing information about you.
Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by RockRobotRock on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @06:22PM (#33336929)
Do you think that's a little too dramatic? Cloudflare took down 8chan and Kiwi Farms, and while the centralization of the web does scare me, I think you're being silly here.
Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by sophacles on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @07:06PM (#33337421)
I don't think they are actually mad at Cloudflare. They just see the last in a very long chain of "refusal to do business" and think it's all cloudflare's fault. It's a lack of reasoning problem - they recommend using other hosts/cdns/etc but never question why their favorite hate site isn't up and running on those alternatives right now. It makes a certain amount of twisted sense though: if they subscribe to a notion as silly as "melanin is the root of evil", they probably have other forms of magical thinking - like "cloudflare killed the site by not keeping their business even when alternatives I recommend exist".
Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by verisimilitudes on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @07:27PM (#33337616)
Now his ISP dropped him. Where does it end?
Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by cvwright on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @06:23PM (#33336941)
Pretty sure AWS offers that feature too
Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by Matheus28 on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @06:19PM (#33336891)
AWS overcharges extremely for bandwidth. But yes, I'd expect that much bandwidth to cost at least around $1m on most providers. If you end up using THAT much bandwidth with so few GET requests, expect a call from CloudFlare.
Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by truetraveller on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @08:38PM (#33338195)
Can they actually do that? It's not mentioned in their ToS.
Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by Matheus28 on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @09:49PM (#33338726)
>Cloudflare may, with or without notice to you and without liability of any kind, temporarily limit your storage and/or the number of requests you can make or receive using the Developer Platform for any reason (in its sole reasonable discretion), including without limitation, if processing such requests would put an undue burden on the Cloudflare network, adversely impact the Service, or otherwise threaten the integrity of Cloudflare’s networks.
Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by truetraveller on Wednesday October 26, 2022 @01:50PM (#33347056)
Thanks for that. Was seriously considering R2. Not anymore.
Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by supermatt on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @06:33PM (#33337054)
I really like the idea of using R2, but it seems like theres no real protection against losing EVERYTHING should a write-enabled key get leaked? On S3, I would be able to set a versioned bucket and prevent deletions, for example.

What are others using R2 for? A "cached" version of your s3 buckets? Im assuming I could set up something like that with workers?

Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by vlovich123 on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @06:47PM (#33337218)
You don't even need to set it up by hand. Cache Reserve is the way to put Cloudflare's CDN with a persistent cache in front of your origin (which could be an S3 bucket). It's a 1 button config thing.

If you use Worker bindings, then there's no write-enabled keys. It's a fair critique obviously and the team is aware of some of the product gaps. We only just launched GA :).

Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by CherryJimbo on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @06:37PM (#33337099)
You would almost certainly have to be paying for an ENT agreement before you got anywhere close to 300PB of traffic, which would incur bandwidth fees.

It'd still be significantly less than $27 million though.

Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by truetraveller on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @08:36PM (#33338184)
300PB is literally on their example pricing page, so they believe this is allowed.
Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by Matheus28 on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @09:19PM (#33338496)
Where?
Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by truetraveller on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @09:45PM (#33338706)
Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by Matheus28 on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @10:01PM (#33338831)
1 GiB * 1000000/day = 29.01 PiB/mo, not 300. But yeah, if they're giving it as an example...
Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by truetraveller on Wednesday October 26, 2022 @12:01AM (#33339658)
It actually is 300PB. Reading 10 million GB / day, for 30 days is $104. 10 million GB = 10 PB. This is from the examples at the bottom.
Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by outworlder on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @06:41PM (#33337145)
See also: https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/

Vendors listed there have pretty competitive pricing for bandwidth.

I find many AWS services to be priced decently (if you are using them properly, elastically scaling, etc). But that's definitely not the case for bandwidth. AZ to AZ charges are one of the worst - yes that's cheaper than egress but that's no consolation because you are essentially required to use multiple AZs if your business actually has any availability requirements.

And don't get me started on NAT Gateway pricing...

Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by truetraveller on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @08:35PM (#33338176)
Unfortunately the "Bandwidth Alliance" is too ambiguous for my liking. It requires both parties to be transparent and have clear ToS, and no limits, etc. In practice, it's simply not worth it. Source: myself trying to "beat the system".
Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by aofeisheng on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @11:35PM (#33339525)
The Cloudflare Bandwidth Alliance is fundamentally a publicity tool for cloud vendors. Because most partners still haven't fulfilled their promises (including the founding members who joined in 2018). Their status is always something like "all bandwidth between X and Cloudflare will be free of charge in the upcoming months". Until one day some of them quit the alliance, such as DigitalOcean (IPO) and Linode (acquired by Akamai). So, just don't trust any of those alliance members.
Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by ignoramous on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @06:44PM (#33337183)
> What is the catch? Am I missing something?

Some say, Cloudflare throws the ToS rule-book at you once you cross 5TB/mo (or whatever the threshold is; we're at multiple-TBs but no one from Cloudflare has thrown as much as an email at us). I mean, look no further than the absurd bandwidth rates they charge for Specturm (their L4 load balancer) [0].

Pretty recently, Cloudflare blogged about AWS' potential 80x markup on egress [1]. That is, the $90/TB AWS charges must cost them a measly $1 or so.

Cloudflare in 2014 blogged about how they work relentlessly to bring down bandwidth costs by peering aggressively where possible [2] (which apparently means $0 for unlimited bandwidth [3]). And where they can't / don't [4], egress is 5x (est) the ingress (one pays for the higher among the two), but this creates an opportunity for an arbitrage and give away DDoS protection for free.

This is pretty similar to Amazon's free-shipping offer for Prime customers despite it being one of the biggest costs to their retail business. Prime basically has since forced Amazon to bring down costs by building expensive and vast distribution and logistics network that spawns the globe; and doing so was a considerable drain on the resources in the short-run, but in the long run, it has become an unbreachable moat around its largest business.

Analysts like Ben Thompson (stratechery.com) and Matthew Eash (hhhypergrowth.com) have written in detail about Cloudflare's modus operandii over the years, with both agreeing that Cloudflare's model is so brilliantly disruptive that even Clayton Christensen would be proud of it.

[0] $1/GB! https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/36004172187...

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/

[2] https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a...

[3] https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/

[4] https://bgpview.io/asn/13335#info

Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by outworlder on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @07:08PM (#33337444)
> Some say, Cloudflare throws the ToS rule-book at you once you cross 5TB/mo

5TB a month sounds low. Sure, it's plenty for a website and many apps, but not much if you require file transfers.

Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by truetraveller on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @08:42PM (#33338230)
This is probably the catch. Cloudflare is, unfortunately, very ambiguous at times. This view is shared by many users on their forums as well.
Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by Gigachad on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @11:29PM (#33339487)
Tbh I wouldn’t trust cloudflare to host anything with their current history.
Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by vasili111 on Thursday October 27, 2022 @01:45PM (#33361232)
Could you please give the examples of "current history"?
Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by Matheus28 on Wednesday October 26, 2022 @01:54PM (#33347117)
It seems that they updated their docs just one hour ago to a 100 KB object instead of 1 GB.
Re:Tell HN: Cloudflare R2 allows 300PB of egress for chump c... by is_true on Wednesday October 26, 2022 @02:20PM (#33347428)