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From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

(dansdatathoughts.substack.com)
274 points dangoldin | 3 comments | 02 Nov 23 19:15 UTC | HN request time: 0.418s | source
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simonsarris ◴[02 Nov 23 19:47 UTC] No.38118991[source]▶
Cloudflare has been attacking the S3 egress problem by creating Sippy: https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/data-migration/sippy/

It allows you to incrementally migrate off of providers like S3 and onto the egress-free Cloudflare R2. Very clever idea.

He calls R2 an undiscovered gem and IMO this is the gem's undiscovered gem. (Understandable since Sippy is very new and still in beta)

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ravetcofx ◴[02 Nov 23 20:00 UTC] No.38119194[source]▶
What are the economics that Amazon and other providers have egress fees and R2 doesn't? Is it acting as a loss leader or does this model still make money for CloudFlare?
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1. candiddevmike ◴[02 Nov 23 20:20 UTC] No.38119521[source]▶
Greed on the cloud providers part, I think. You'd expect egress fees to enable cheaper compute, but there are other cloud providers out there like Hetzner with cheaper compute and egress, so the economics don't really add up.
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2. vidarh ◴[02 Nov 23 20:49 UTC] No.38119947[source]▶
Indeed, Hetzner is so much cheaper that if you have high S3 egress fees you can rent Hetzner boxes to sit in front of your S3 deployment as caching proxies and get a lot of extra "free" compute on top.

It's an option that's often been attractive if/when you didn't want the hassle of building out something that could provide S3 level durability yourself. But with more/cheaper S3 competitors it's becoming a significantly less attractive option.

3. wkat4242 ◴[03 Nov 23 09:17 UTC] No.38126264[source]▶
Scaleway also, and they are fully S3 compatible. I use their glacier service for backup. I store 1.5TB for around 3€ per month.

I used the storage box from hetzner before but they only had 1TB or 5TB (and higher) choices so I had to pay for 5TB (€12 per month) without using most of it. Having rsync support was nice but rclone works fine with S3.