Personally I find Backblaze B2 more compelling.<p>... Ok, after writing that, I realized that I should probably look up R2's offering first. And then my jaw hit the floor at "free egress bandwidth".<p><i>Free egress bandwidth</i>? Yes please.<p>I will instantly convert.<p>Then I was worried about price per GB. $0.015/GB is incredibly competitive.<p>Good lord, where do I get early access to this thing? I'd transition all our infra today.
IMO, the best feature Cloudflare added to R2 was the automatic migration. This makes sense for a CDN to offer, but if R2 works, this makes it pretty simple to migrate.<p>"After specifying an existing storage bucket, R2 will serve requests for objects from the existing bucket,"<p>I've Beene evaluating R2, but this migration path makes it dead simple to use. I just point my code to read/write from/to R2 instead of S3, and I'll get egress fees from AWS during the migration, but then that's it?
This article touches on the one major unanswered question I have about R2: CloudFlare's CDN ToS make it clear CF is meant to host websites and APIs, not content downloads [1]. Does R2 have similar ToS? It's reasonable that CF doesn't want R2 customers that use 500MB of paid storage and 500TB of free bandwidth, so what is acceptable use?<p>[1] The Services are offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Services solely for the purpose of (i) serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other functionally equivalent applications, including rendering Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or other functional equivalents, and (ii) serving web APIs subject to the restrictions set forth in this Section 2.8. Use of the Services for serving video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content is prohibited, unless purchased separately as part of a Paid Service or expressly allowed under our Supplemental Terms for a specific Service.
Slight miscalculation which should have been obvious:<p>"For example, Backblaze B2’s free operations threshold is capped at 2,500 a day, and if R2 simply let you make a GetObject request every second of every day, that would be something like 86,400 FREE daily Gets, which would cost ~$335 daily on B2 or $122,000 a year."<p>Backblaze B2 Class B operations are priced at $0.004 per 10k operations which the author did not take into account, so the calculation above is off by a factor of 10,000. The real cost for 1 GET per second for a whole year on Backblaze B2 is $12.59.
In any comparisons with B2, don't forget to consider that they have a 2 hour maintenance window every Thursday during the US business day: <a href="https://www.backblaze.com/scheduled-maintenance.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.backblaze.com/scheduled-maintenance.html</a><p>They usually don't go down during that time, but sometimes they do and their support told us to always expect outages during this time.<p>If you need your B2 data available during those windows, you'll need to also set up a failover data source for those times.
I think this question misses the point. Few organisations use just S3 - they use the entire AWS ecosystem, of which S3 plays a central part.
The biggest blocker for most enterprises is probably AWS IAM integration.<p>With S3 I can write a bucket policy that references roles that can be assumed by instances, Lambda functions, people via SSO etc.<p>With R2, I now need to worry about how to securely distribute credentials to access the buckets, how to rotate those credentials, how to ensure they don't leak. It's perfectly do-able, but it means AWS are always going to have the upper hand.<p>I'm excited to see some real competition in this space, but switching to R2 has some significant blockers at present. If I was working for Cloudflare on this product, I'd be focusing my effort on how to make integrating R2 with AWS services as simple as possible. I definitely think it's do-able, but it's going to need a team all of its own.
Seems like a person could create an unbelieving cheap podcast hosting business (Simplecast, Transistor.fm, etc) on the back of R2.<p>For those unaware, the primary infrastructure cost of these businesses is serving up mp3.<p>Much like what YouTube does for video.
Hi, I'm LV, I wrote this post. I co-founded Taloflow to make choosing cloud vendors transparent and easy.<p>I'm curious to hear what factors HN readers think I missed and if you think Cloudflare R2 will be a threat in the cloud object storage market place.
Let's say you sell a data product that generates around 1TB per day, which is downloaded by every customer once. On AWS/GCP, that's roughly $80/day/customer in egress costs, which would make the minimum pricing of the data product $30K/year to break even SOLELY egress, assuming each customer only does the download once.<p>It's basically not possible to offer something like this on AWS or GCP, you have to run your own server somewhere with flat bandwidth pricing. If I were still in the data business, I'd absolutely be moving everything to R2.
What I want to see is Cloudflare enable hosting static websites on R2. For me that would be an absolute game changer.<p>I know you can already host websites on Cloudflare using another service but I want to see R2 get enabled.
There are simply too many object store vendors, with different storage pricing, egress pricing, network speed, and reliabilities.<p>What about using SeaweedFS gateway to remote object store? <a href="https://github.com/chrislusf/seaweedfs/wiki/Gateway-to-Remote-Object-Storage" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/chrislusf/seaweedfs/wiki/Gateway-to-Remot...</a><p>Basically you can think it is a cache. You operate with normal S3 APIs, and the data will be uploaded to remote storage asynchronously (most vendors have free uploading).<p>It's not a magic pill for all users, but it should be very fast, and cut down the API costs, egress costs.
I think AWS backed themselves into a corner with their extremely high egress charges. I would wager that a pretty considerable amount of their revenue is from egress, so if they have to reduce egress pricing, it will take a pretty big chunk of their revenue.<p>Of course, I could be completely wrong. I would certainly welcome a correction.
Where are all the Backblaze marketing folk? :) B2 has an offer at present where they will eat the cost of a one-time S3 egress in exchange for a 1 year storage commitment. This offer is <i>much</i> more transparent, although I do still admire CloudFlare's strategy here.
I skipped this and read the original announcement. Cloudflare has some serious skin in this game it seems - definitely earned raised eyebrows.<p>The migration bit alone is going to be enough to motivate PMs and devs to switch. The free egress seems insane from a business perspective but if Cloudflare wants to do it them I'm all for it.<p>Very cool.
Removing egress is awesome<p>> Except you can put R2 in front of S3 and set it to "slurp" mode. That way as objects are requested through the normal course of use they'll be stored in R2. You can then keep S3 as a backup, or delete the objects that have moved over.
Being a proxy is cool.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28703464" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28703464</a><p>Note: I think it's pretty obvious that they are very pro AWS. I saw a lot of positive comments and very few negative comments here. Reading the blog post makes it look like it was the inverse.
I've commented elsewhere, and I'll comment here again: Cloudflare R2 is really a re-packaging / re-positioning of how most customers were using Cloudflare's CDN in the first place: As a low-cost content delivery network. As a small tech shop, we front S3 with Cloudflare (not CloudFront, because it's relatively expensive) for binary downloads, and pay single digit $ to AWS and $0 to Cloudflare. If we were pushing blobs through S3 + accelerated buckets; or S3 + CloudFront; or S3 + transfer-acceleration, our AWS bill would have been 3x / 5x.<p>Relying on Cloudflare to do tiered-caching / transfer-acceleration afforded by tight integration between its CDN and R2 would lead us to drop S3 altogether for our workloads.<p>We've also experimented using Workers KV as a blob store (it has a cap of 25MB per key; costs $5 per million writes, $0.5 per million reads; $5 per 10GB of storage; <i>zero</i> egress fee) and its pricing comes out <i>cheaper</i> than S3. We'd have moved to KV already if R2 hadn't been announced. Now, we think it is prudent to bide our time till R2 goes public.<p>But: we are a rather tiny tech shop and agonize over bill items like <i>egress</i>; most enterprises worry more about data security, compliance, and integration with big-data tools (like EMR, Athena, Firehose, RedShift etc). So, I am not sure if there'd be an exodus off-the-bat (at least not until Cloudflare has equivalent integrations / services in-place [0]). Though, I can see why companies like smugmug (who have been using S3 since 2006!) <i>may</i> move.<p>The killer here is, R2 will sweep away dev shops at the low-end of the market. If anyone's starting a bootstrapped SaaS company, not only does Cloudflare becomes <i>the</i> place for them to prototype a MVP (as opposed to AWS/Azure/GCP) but also an integration point for their offerings (consider: a Tableau competitor + R2) [1]. As noted by Ben Thompson a few days ago, there's little AWS can do despite knowing what's in store, other than cannibalize their own business (which they're not afraid to do!) [2]. We are entering uncharted waters here: Two companies fully drowning in HBS credos going after each other. Wonder what Clayton Christensen would have thought of that.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_contagion" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_contagion</a><p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network</a><p>[2] <a href="https://stratechery.com/2021/cloudflares-disruption/" rel="nofollow">https://stratechery.com/2021/cloudflares-disruption/</a>
Won't be surprised if AWS counters this sooner or later in terms of reducing egress fee, but the fact that S3 is core to AWS's eco system and ties in well, is another blocker for migration
We used DigitalOcean Spaces for some time, but it works very slow. Every few requests we get 500-5000ms delays. So we switched to Amazon S3 and it works much better.
So when I first saw R2, I was sure we're gonna migrate as soon as we can. Post mentions that Backblaze and Wasabi offer better prices, but I couldn't find any reviews at the time when we migrated to amazon. Is it gonna work as DigitalOcean? How often there's downtime? Does anybody use them and has opinion?
R2 only seems to offer better price than S3. If people using S3 were caring so much about the cost they wouldn't use S3 in the first place. So my bet is that it won't change anything for S3<p>I also bet it will not change anything for B2. They will still be cheaper than R2<p>It always funny to see people on HN thinking that price for enterprise companies is a critical factor. It is for some, but for most of them (especially the ones using AWS) it is not
I need to test presignedurls in R2 to figure out if they allow specifying file names, file size limits and time limits for the put/post requests. If so, then I might switch from B2 and S3.
I think it's kind of sad that, with all of the services offering an object store, nobody has created a better API standard than cloning the weird and clunky S3 API.
How does Cloudflare's billing work? Can I set a hard cap, or is it like AWS where if I'm not careful I could end up with extreme bill shock?<p>After some bad experiences and reading about other people's bad experiences, I won't use AWS anymore for anything that's not yet big enough to have expensive lawyers and people monitoring expenses daily. So I'm very interested to know how Cloudflare compares on this front.
AWS's bandwidth pricing is already crazy expensive on US, but when you look at LATAM pricing (Sao Paulo) it's simply outrageous. And you're paying in USD with a devalued BRL.<p>If Cloudflare really delivers R2 with free egress and a global CDN you'd have to be crazy not to switch.
Given the pricing, and the ability to fault in storage from S3 in any case, almost certainly "yes" is the answer to the headline, in stunning contradiction to Betteridge's law!
How about the performance?<p>S3 is faster than other cloud products such as Dropbox or GCP.<p>Will R2 be as fast, durable, reliable, etc, with same features, eg, all sorts of encryption key management etc?
when they say free egress, it means there is a rate limit probably. How many GB max can you transfer in 1 day at 10Mbits/s. You have to set a limit as your shared hardware has limits
Will AWS use their dirty trick again and reduce pricing, just because there is another competitor? If so, why didn't they decreased prices before?