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From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

(dansdatathoughts.substack.com)
274 points dangoldin | 1 comments | 02 Nov 23 19:15 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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NicoJuicy ◴[02 Nov 23 20:05 UTC] No.38119285[source]▶
You pay for the capacity of your network.

Cloudflare has huge ingress, because they need it to protect sites against DDOS.

They basically already pay for their R2 bandwidth ( = egress) because of that.

Additionally, with their SDN ( software defined networking) they can fine-tune some of the Data-Flow/bandwidth too.

That's how I understood it, fyi.

Some more info could be found when they started ( or co-founded, not sure) the bandwidth alliance.

Eg.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/

https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/

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miselin ◴[02 Nov 23 20:15 UTC] No.38119446[source]▶
Also, for the CDN case that R2 seems to be targeting - regardless of the origin of the data (R2 or S3), chances are pretty good that Cloudflare is already paying for the egress anyway.
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NicoJuicy ◴[02 Nov 23 20:18 UTC] No.38119491[source]▶
I'm not sure about that.

A CDN keeps the data nearby, reducing the need to pay egress to the big bandwidth providers.

( not an expert though)

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1. ilc ◴[02 Nov 23 21:44 UTC] No.38120638{3}[source]▶
Let's say you want to use cloudflare, or another CDN. The process is pretty simple.

You setup your website and preferably DON'T have it talk to anyone other than the CDN.

You then point your DNS to wherever the CDN tells you to. (Or let them take over DNS. Depends on the provider.)

The CDN then will fetch data from your site and cache it, as needed.

Your site is the "origin", in CDN speak.

If Cloudflare can move the origin within their network, there is huge cost savings and reliability increases there. This is game changing stuff. Do not under estimate it.