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It's amazing how much conversation Cloudflare has created with this without even releasing the product yet. I can't remember the last time there was this much

It's amazing how much conversation Cloudflare has created with this without even releasing the product yet. I can't remember the last time there was this much interest in a new product launch - which gives an indication to the market need for pricing changes on this front. However, AWS re:invent is right around the corner and I suspect this will cause an announcement or two to come from the AWS side.

InvaderFizz 5y ago
> However, AWS re:invent is right around the corner and I suspect this will cause an announcement or two to come from the AWS side. Call me a pessimist, but I expect that will happen around the same time they make managed NAT gateways reasonably priced. I'm going to say never. I'll likely be right for years before I am eventually wrong due to the sticker price not moving but inflation making it relatively affordable. Go ahead AWS, prove me wrong!
- judge2020 5y ago
  AWS's lock-in is in the egress. If you already got multiple petabytes ingested into AWS (for free), it's going to cost you a lot to send them to CF once.
  - eastdakota 5y ago
    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.
    - qaq 5y ago
      The power dynamic is same as in retail whoever is closest to the "edge" wins in the long term. Kindah glad I have a bunch of NET :)
    - corobo 5y ago
      Slurp mode is a great idea Kudos to all involved in this project! :)
NicoJuicy 5y ago
AWS can't reduce prices and have less revenue. That's not their goal, their goal is to keep expanding products. They would also bring cloudflare in the spotlight and they already have the core products as a cloud hoster ( rdbms, nosql, serverless, apps, ... ). Additionally, reducing eggres and making use of 3rd party products possible is not in their interest long term ( eg. The fork of elastic search). What do you think they can do/announce?
seanieb 5y ago
This is on par with Google launching Gmail with 1GB + “infinity” space. The other email providers didn’t know what hit them. It took them years to catchup.
nindalf 5y ago
AWS could announce something that counters only this, perhaps making egress for S3 alone cheaper. But they won’t make egress itself free or close to free because egress is what keeps you checked in to Hotel California. Removing egress feed is not just about taking a massive hit to revenue. If it was, they might bite the bullet and hope that the lower prices would attract more customers in the long term. But bandwidth pricing is the moat around their castle. If it didn’t exist, Snowflake and others would leave. But more than that, new AWS services benefit from the captive audience choosing them by default. Without the moat, each service has to compete on its merits. AWS Lambda, for example would need to be better than CloudFlare Workers or fly.io containers. It won’t win customers like it does today just because it’s “free” bandwidth. They won’t rush to announce anything that might affect the foundation of their multi billion dollar money printing machine. They’ll take their time and see how customers react. If any large customer threatens to leave, they’ll be offered credits to stay. But that information about what customers want and what they’re likely to do will help them come up with a strategy.
kkielhofner 5y ago
Cloudflare has been ramping up a now years long campaign to (finally and rightfully) draw attention to the ridiculous bandwidth costs for AWS with their Bandwidth Alliance and now R2. Say what you want about Cloudflare (disclosure: I'm a happy customer) but this campaign is a substantial benefit for any consumer of cloud services whether you use Cloudflare or not. My contention, as I've commented here before, is that AWS is taking advantage of a new "cloud native" generation of developers, startup founders, C-suite, etc who have never purchased bandwidth/transit, run an AS (autonomous system), etc. As mentioned in the twitter thread Amazon is essentially charging 1998 prices for bandwidth. I wouldn't be surprised at all if many of their services are essentially loss-leaders and Amazon more than makes up for it with their ridiculous markup on bandwidth. This "cloud native" generation can wrap their heads around instances, request rates, storage volume, K8s, containers, functions, etc but the pricing on bandwidth is very nebulous, notoriously difficult to estimate/control, and poorly understood. Without organizational experience and knowledge of the real bandwidth costs in 2021 the assumption is likely "well, that's just what bandwidth costs".

InvaderFizz 5y ago

> However, AWS re:invent is right around the corner and I suspect this will cause an announcement or two to come from the AWS side. Call me a pessimist, but I expect that will happen around the same time they make managed NAT gateways reasonably priced. I'm going to say never. I'll likely be right for years before I am eventually wrong due to the sticker price not moving but inflation making it relatively affordable. Go ahead AWS, prove me wrong!

judge2020 5y ago
AWS's lock-in is in the egress. If you already got multiple petabytes ingested into AWS (for free), it's going to cost you a lot to send them to CF once.
- eastdakota 5y ago
  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.
  - qaq 5y ago
    The power dynamic is same as in retail whoever is closest to the "edge" wins in the long term. Kindah glad I have a bunch of NET :)
  - corobo 5y ago
    Slurp mode is a great idea Kudos to all involved in this project! :)

NicoJuicy 5y ago

AWS can't reduce prices and have less revenue. That's not their goal, their goal is to keep expanding products. They would also bring cloudflare in the spotlight and they already have the core products as a cloud hoster ( rdbms, nosql, serverless, apps, ... ). Additionally, reducing eggres and making use of 3rd party products possible is not in their interest long term ( eg. The fork of elastic search). What do you think they can do/announce?

seanieb 5y ago

This is on par with Google launching Gmail with 1GB + “infinity” space. The other email providers didn’t know what hit them. It took them years to catchup.

nindalf 5y ago

AWS could announce something that counters only this, perhaps making egress for S3 alone cheaper. But they won’t make egress itself free or close to free because egress is what keeps you checked in to Hotel California. Removing egress feed is not just about taking a massive hit to revenue. If it was, they might bite the bullet and hope that the lower prices would attract more customers in the long term. But bandwidth pricing is the moat around their castle. If it didn’t exist, Snowflake and others would leave. But more than that, new AWS services benefit from the captive audience choosing them by default. Without the moat, each service has to compete on its merits. AWS Lambda, for example would need to be better than CloudFlare Workers or fly.io containers. It won’t win customers like it does today just because it’s “free” bandwidth. They won’t rush to announce anything that might affect the foundation of their multi billion dollar money printing machine. They’ll take their time and see how customers react. If any large customer threatens to leave, they’ll be offered credits to stay. But that information about what customers want and what they’re likely to do will help them come up with a strategy.

kkielhofner 5y ago

Cloudflare has been ramping up a now years long campaign to (finally and rightfully) draw attention to the ridiculous bandwidth costs for AWS with their Bandwidth Alliance and now R2. Say what you want about Cloudflare (disclosure: I'm a happy customer) but this campaign is a substantial benefit for any consumer of cloud services whether you use Cloudflare or not. My contention, as I've commented here before, is that AWS is taking advantage of a new "cloud native" generation of developers, startup founders, C-suite, etc who have never purchased bandwidth/transit, run an AS (autonomous system), etc. As mentioned in the twitter thread Amazon is essentially charging 1998 prices for bandwidth. I wouldn't be surprised at all if many of their services are essentially loss-leaders and Amazon more than makes up for it with their ridiculous markup on bandwidth. This "cloud native" generation can wrap their heads around instances, request rates, storage volume, K8s, containers, functions, etc but the pricing on bandwidth is very nebulous, notoriously difficult to estimate/control, and poorly understood. Without organizational experience and knowledge of the real bandwidth costs in 2021 the assumption is likely "well, that's just what bandwidth costs".