Cloudflare R2 Pricing
developers.cloudflare.comDoes that mean that reading a 100kB file from within the datacenter where the object is stored costs the same serving a 5TB file to an external consumer?
(I already found S3's per-request pricing weird for reading big files, but at least there it's limited to internal traffic not egress)
I would flip it - serving a 5TB file externally is now as cheap as reading a 100kb file. Bandwidth is now free. This might be the old "commoditize your complement" since AWS makes so much money/margin on their b/w.
Free egress is wild.
Imgur was created to be "an image hosting provider that doesn't suck", but that didn't last long. I always figured the reason why Imgur turned to shit was because they needed to drive traffic to their front page so they can serve ads to pay the bills, but I imagine egress was their biggest cost.
If egress was free, it could massively reduce their costs.
I wonder how feasible it would be to keep cold assets on Backblaze B2 and automatically move them to R2 if they get hot enough.
Better yet, seeing as how you get free transfers between Backblaze and Cloudflare, I wonder if the 10ms cpu limit on free workers (or 50ms paid) would be enough to do the entire process on CF's servers.
The blog post seems to indicate that there will be an automatic way to move assets to R2 from a S3 compatible service. I haven't gotten access to R2 yet so no idea what settings they have.
"To make this easy for you, without requiring you to change any of your tooling, Cloudflare R2 will include automatic migration from other S3-compatible cloud storage services. Migrations are designed to be dead simple. After specifying an existing storage bucket, R2 will serve requests for objects from the existing bucket, egressing the object only once before copying and serving from R2."
I believe this was called "slurp mode" when they first announced the product
> or 50ms paid
It's actually 30 seconds these days (for Workers Unbound pricing model).
> do the entire process on CF's servers.
Entire process of what, exactly? If you are just streaming the bytes through, that takes negligible CPU time, so yes, you could do it on the free plan.
Yes, very true. I think sometimes you may have to do extra work like calculating hashes, but that can likely be taken from the B2 response if it's compatible with R2 or calculated beforehand.
Couple that with the low latency KV and it all shouldn't be too hard to get going! On that note, I hope the overall latency of R2 isn't too bad. I assume it'll all work with CF caching though. B2 was never too good in regard to latency.
I wonder... would the TOS allow storing a huge video on B2, proxying it on the fly to R2, redirecting the user to that, then deleting it afterwards? It does say you'd be charged by gb-month stored...
The prices seem incredible. Will Cloudflare actually make any money off this?
Storage is $15/TB/Month. Commodity hard drives currently go for around $17/TB.
Considering data is replicated across several hard drives, servers and electricity aren’t free, etc. I would guess that Cloudflare won’t break even on storage until several months of utilization (unlike Amazon who probably breaks even on day 1).
I guess in the long term the product will at least pay for itself, in the short term it will just be a marketing campaign and gives people a good reason to switch from their Amazon stack in case they don't depend on things like EC2-S3 transfers. When comparing to Backblaze B2 [1], Cloudflare's storage cost is 3x but you don't pay for egress as a tradeoff (compared to 0.01$/GB for Backblaze).
You are comparing monthly price with lifetime price.
That makes sense since they're calculating the time it takes to amortize the hardware purchase.
I think the real question is "How much money is Amazon extracting from users?"
Egress pricing 100 times lower than Amazon could be realistic (S3 egress costs between $50/TB and $90/TB, while Hetzner bills 1 EUR/TB, and Cloudflare is bigger than Hetzner).
Free egrees is weird. In particular using R2 to offer videos or other big downloads appears to be unrealistically cheap.
A $1/TB offer would still be very appealing, while allowing Cloudflare to break even on traffic-heavy use-cases.
What does R2 stand for?
> Cloudflare R2 (beta) documentation
> Cloudflare R2 Storage allows developers to store large amounts of unstructured data without the costly egress bandwidth fees associated with typical cloud storage services.
Is is merely (S-1)(3-1)?
Yes, see their initial announcement post where they showed it’s a backronym.
> Announcing Cloudflare R2 Storage: Rapid and Reliable Object Storage, minus the egress fees