Cloudflare To Enter Infrastructure Services Market With New R2 Storage Product (techcrunch.com) 19
Cloudflare, which has a network of data centers in 250 locations around the world, announced its first dalliance with infrastructure services today, an upcoming cloud storage offering called R2. From a report: Company co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince says that the idea for moving into storage as a service came from the same place as other ideas the company has turned into products. It was something they needed in-house and that led to them building it for themselves, before offering it to customers too. "When we build products, the reason that we end up building them is usually because we need them ourselves," Prince told me. He said that the storage component grew out of the need to store object components like images on the company's network. Once they built it, and they looked around at the cloud storage landscape, they decided that it would make sense to offer it as a product to customers too. [...] The R2 name is a little swipe at Amazon's S3 storage product and obviously a play on the name. The difference, according to Prince, is that they have found a way to reduce storage costs by up to 10% by eliminating egress fees. Cloudflare plans to price storage at $0.015 per GB of data stored per month. That compares with S3 pricing that starts at $0.023 per GB for the first 50 TB per month. Ben Thompson, writing at Stratechery: The reason that Cloudflare can pull this off is the same reason why S3's margins are so extraordinary: bandwidth is a fixed cost, not a marginal one. To take the most simplified example possible, if I were to have two computers connected by a cable, the cost of bandwidth is however much I paid for the cable; once connected I can transmit as much data I would like for free -- in either direction.
That's not quite right, of course: I am constrained by the capacity of the cable; to support more data transfer I would have to install a higher capacity cable, or more of them. What, though, if I already had built a worldwide network of cables for my initial core business of protecting websites from distributed denial-of-service attacks and offering a content delivery network, the value of which was such that ISPs everywhere gave me space in their facilities to place my servers? Well, then I would have massive amounts of bandwidth already in place, the use of which has zero marginal costs, and oh-by-the-way locations close to end users to stick a whole bunch of hard drives.
In other words, I would be Cloudflare: I would charge marginal rates for my actual marginal costs (storage, and some as-yet-undetermined-but-promised-to-be-lower-than-S3 rate for operations), and give away my zero marginal cost product for free. S3's margin is R2's opportunity.
That's not quite right, of course: I am constrained by the capacity of the cable; to support more data transfer I would have to install a higher capacity cable, or more of them. What, though, if I already had built a worldwide network of cables for my initial core business of protecting websites from distributed denial-of-service attacks and offering a content delivery network, the value of which was such that ISPs everywhere gave me space in their facilities to place my servers? Well, then I would have massive amounts of bandwidth already in place, the use of which has zero marginal costs, and oh-by-the-way locations close to end users to stick a whole bunch of hard drives.
In other words, I would be Cloudflare: I would charge marginal rates for my actual marginal costs (storage, and some as-yet-undetermined-but-promised-to-be-lower-than-S3 rate for operations), and give away my zero marginal cost product for free. S3's margin is R2's opportunity.
S3 API Compatibility (Score:2)
Seems like R2 will have full S3 compatibility [cloudflare.com].
Re: (Score:2)
The service will be called R2 — “one less than S3,” quipped Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince
Should have called it T4 - because that's obviously one better than S3.
These guys suck at marketing.
Re: (Score:2)
If it was T4 then it would be vulnerable to AIDS.
D2 storage company (Score:3)
I think I'll start up up the D2 storage company and use cloudflare R2 for my back end...
Pipe-dream. (Score:2)
That's nice. There's still the current state of the asymmetrical broadband pipes between us and them, as well as the ever growing size of the potential customers local storage. Cheap storage is only part of the problem.
Remove the restraining bolt (Score:4, Funny)
cost about the same as owning an array? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You also get Cloudflare's distribution network. I see this as a way to provide data to end-users without having to saturate your own pipes to do so. With no egress cost it can ramp-up easily.
Re: (Score:2)
That is typical. Corporate customers get their cloud savings on salaries, not hardware.
Wasabi still has them beat (Score:2)
$0.006/GB/month, no ingress/egress fees. Plus, they advertise on Slashdot, and they have fantastic customer service, so I'm more than happy to give Wasabi my money and my data.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Wasabi still has them beat (Score:4, Interesting)
Wasabi (and Backblaze for that matter) is in a whole other ballgame.
I have a work project with ~ 1TB of geospatial map tiles. We currently deliver about 9 TB of data a month from that set (a lot isn't that popular). In AWS S3, that's about $800 in egress, $25 a month in storage and around $50 a month in GET ops.
If the project got much more popular... the egress (and GETs) would go up with it.
Wasabi isn't even an option. "If your monthly egress data transfer is greater than your active storage volume, then your storage use case is not a good fit for Wasabi’s free egress policy. If your use case exceeds the guidelines of our free egress policy on a regular basis, we reserve the right to limit or suspend your service." https://wasabi.com/paygo-prici... [wasabi.com]. We use them as a backup site, sure, but they're not a content hosting site.
If CloudFlare is offering to replace our AWS bill for around $50 a month (current usage), going up a little with GET ops if we got more popular, that's an instant winner.
Re: (Score:2)
And backblaze is still cheaper (Score:3)
Personally I've found cloudflare terribly unreliable. Their online reviews are full of people with similar experiences...
Hey article guy, (Score:2)
You had one job.
Needs a "D2" API (Score:2)
A match made in Cloud City.
Amazon or Fastly is MUCH better than CloudFlare (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Ironic that your link is complaining that Cloudflare blocks Tor but that URL can't be read using Tor either.
I reset the Tor tunnel four times and the server blocked all five times.
Talk about hypocrites.