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Cloudflare partners with Microsoft, Google and others to reduce bandwidth costs
- pickleman 8y agoThere goes any level of free speech...
- tempuser24 8y agoI'm not sure I follow, but Cloudflare has a history of being a strong defender of free speech. They even defended Neo-Nazis. https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-cloudflare/ https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-cloudflare/
- pickleman 8y agoThey stopped protecting them, and it looks like it might have been because they were eyeing this partnership. Microsoft threatened to remove services for Gab because they didn't like what some of the users were saying. I don't necessarily agree with any of those people's opinions on things, but it's a canary in the coal mine. Microsoft and Google are anti-free speech, and if Cloudflare starts relying on them, they can threaten to remove services if Cloudflare doesn't kiss the ring and do what they're told (i.e. censor thought crimes).
- matt4077 8y agoYeah... Of course! To join this marketing alliance, Google decided, more than a year ago, to demand that CF sever ties with exactly one of their customers. Apart from how wacky that conspiracy theory is: Do you believe you can devalue Cloudflare's stated motivation by replacing it with a financial motive instead? Because it would seem to me that your theory would just shift that moral motivation to Google, no? Unless, of course, Google themselves are in turn pressured by some even more powerful group. Who's that? George Soros? Hillary Clinton?
- pickleman 8y agoThere is absolutely an industry built around doing corporate shakedowns. Pretty much every major corporation has been sued https://www.wired.com/story/new-lawsuit-exposes-googles-desperation-to-improve-diversity/ https://www.wired.com/story/new-lawsuit-exposes-googles-desp... You can wave your arms and shout "conspiracy! conspiracy!" like a mad man if you want, but that won't change facts and what's really going on. You're acting smug and condescending because you think you're right, but the reality is that you are the one that doesn't know what you're talking about. Maybe someday Netflix will release a documentary that wraps up all the facts and puts a bow on it for you and you'll be able to understand it.
- jgrahamc 8y agoBlog has more details: https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- partiallypro 8y agoIt's funny that this has just been announced, as I was doing an audit of our outgoing bandwidth costs and saw that our data being flagged as outgoing data in our Azure Service Plans was much much lower compared to our other data center despite Azure having larger sites. The key difference was that Cloudflare had been implemented on our Azure webapps, but not on the other data center sites. I'm not sure if this has been happening for a while for Azure and is just being announced or if it's pure coincidence. Either way I am a happy user of both Azure and Cloudflare. Anecdotally though I have also noticed on Cloudflare as they have moved to more pricing models that uncached hits on free plans have increased while our higher plans have fallen/remained the same. That too could be coincidence or a need for rule changes. I also wonder how this will effect using CDNs from Azure Edge, Akamai, etc. Are those included in the bandwidth alliance?
- khc 8y agoIs that because you have tiered caching on for your paid plans?
- partiallypro 8y agoI'm not sure, it could just be a bad sample size on the free sites I have through Cloudflare. I will hopefully be reviewing those soon to see if it feels more widespread. It could just be a rule set incorrectly in the few I've glanced at. No doubt that though paid tiers can high caching hits, especially if you enable Argo.
- khc 8y agoArgo by itself does not improve hit rate, but that's often coming with tiered caching. Source: I work on the cache team at cloudflare
- partiallypro 8y agoDoesn't Argo come with tiered caching? At least according to your marketing materials it helps increase cache hit ratios. https://blog.cloudflare.com/argo/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/argo/ "Customers enabling Argo can expect to see a 60% reduction in their cache miss rate as compared to Cloudflare’s traditional CDN service."
- patrickg_zill 8y agoAs an aside, typical wholesale prices in the US, for moving 200gb of data is about 50 cents, or less. So what is current cloud pricing for 200 gb of egress?
- atYevP 8y agoYev from Backblaze here -> We charge $0.01/gb for egress. With this Alliance announcement, that'll be $0.00 from Backblaze B2 to Cloudflare. We have similar partnerships in place with Packet and ServerCentral already!
- partiallypro 8y agoNot exactly a fair comparison to other Cloud providers on cost for egress, since you largely just do backups. So most data is incoming rather than outgoing. I assume you don't charge for incoming data either, and most providers don't...just adding a caveat as to why you are so so cheap compared to AWS and Azure.
- atYevP 8y agoOur Online Backup service is primarily for backing up computers, but Backblaze B2 is used for a wide variety of things including origin-stores, and those use-cases are pretty in-line with what folks use Azure and GCS for - so should be pretty similar - unless I misunderstood!
- partiallypro 8y agoI guess I should say I mean you aren't offering compute services so you probably have less egress than the others, afiak. Just a wild guess.
- zackbloom 8y agoAWS starts at $0.15/GB, so $30. It's an unbelievable ripoff, particularly given if AWS is peered with your destination they are actually paying $0.
- hesdeadjim 8y agoAmazon is noticeably absent. I would love to know what percent of their profit comes from their egregious egress rates.
- godzillabrennus 8y agoThere are price comparison tools like http://www.ucxmarket.com http://www.ucxmarket.com that can help make prices more transparent.
- ttul 8y agoWe switched to DirectConnect for egress and saved literally 80% overnight...
- mrep 8y agoI talked to a network engineer at AWS a while back about it and he said it was one of their biggest profit centers with around a 90% margin.
- chocolatkey 8y agoI just want to make sure: this means that if you are using cloudflare in front of, for example, backblaze to serve static assets, that you will have 0 egress fees to pay? No catch?
- elithrar 8y agoYou would get zero egress from Backblaze, but Cloudflare (or whomever is the eyeball facing provider) will still meter your bandwidth/requests/etc at their edge -> client.
- r1ch 8y agoCloudflare offers unmetered bandwidth, so this should remove any bandwidth costs completely. https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200172656-Does-Cloudflare-have-bandwidth-limits-or-charge-for-bandwidth- https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200172656-D...
- chocolatkey 8y agoYeah, that's why this is almost unbelievable. What a day. Thanks for the reverse birthday present
- elithrar 8y agoThat's not quite true. Some of their products (Argo; their virtual backbone service) bills on GB; others on requests. That's still going to apply, and it's also going to apply for larger customers on contract.
- huangbong 8y agoOnce you reach a certain level of traffic (a lot of TBs/month) going through their reverse proxy they will have someone from sales reach out to you and make you to start paying.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- cwt137 8y agoI'm not a network guy, but can someone explain how this is more significant than a multi-lateral peering agreement?
- alaties 8y agoEven with peering in place behind the scenes, cloud providers would still usually charge for egress from storage and cdn services to a provider like cloudflare. What Cloudflare et al are doing here is utilizing the peering connections that they have already in place and not billing at the usual egress rate when traffic routes over these peering connections.
- eastdakota 8y agoPeering has been in place for a long time between cloud providers. However, the cloud providers have charged their customers the same amount regardless of whether traffic is sent across transit (which they pay incrementally for) or peering (which they don’t). The Bandwidth Alliance does two things: 1) cloud providers agree to waive or substantially discount the price of bandwidth for their customers when passing over peered connections; and 2) Cloudflare hauls the traffic at no cost to customers to the nearest location where it can be passed over a peered connection. The net effect is customers’ bandwidth bills are substantially decreased and it becomes far more affordable to move data from one cloud to another.
- loosescrews 8y agoOne service which many cloud provides include in their egress fees is transferring data through their network to close to the other end. This can improve performance as the cloud provider often has a better private network than the public internet. This service is also one that Cloudflare provides, except they don't charge for it. It sounds like what is happening here is that the cloud providers are egressing close to the end within their network directly to Cloudflare, who is then doing the more expensive work of transferring the data to close to the other end. This makes the traffic like intra-regional traffic for the cloud provider, which is often free or deeply discounted.
- notriddle 8y agoY'all realize this is basically "we're going to stop net neutrality", right? That it's anti-competitive with CDN's that don't sign the contract, just like everybody got bent out of shape with COX doing?
- manigandham 8y agoHow does this have anything to do with net neutrality? Nobody is filtering the traffic, it's all equal. You can use whatever provider you want, but customers will probably choose the ones that provide greater value instead of paying the ridiculous bandwidth markups by the rest.
- devwastaken 8y agoI don't trust this one bit. Bandwidth costs make or break implimenting ideas, and service agreements like this can just stop at any time. Cloudflare cannot be the only service that gets this. The fact that cloud providers won't reduce their costs independently tells you they're not doing this to reduce prices. It's marketing, and they're making money on it. When cloud providers start to encroach on cloudflares territory it'll also be a conflict of interest and this deal will be gone. Id be happy if cloud providers reduced bandwidth costs for cached assets even.
- Operyl 8y agoUh .. of course they're going to make money off of it? Cloudflare is going to get new paying customers, and the partners will probably get something out of it too. That's a no-brainer, nothing is truly free.