7 ms·

Personally I find Backblaze B2 more compelling. ... Ok, after writing that, I realized that I should probably look up R2's offering first. And then my jaw hit

Personally I find Backblaze B2 more compelling. ... Ok, after writing that, I realized that I should probably look up R2's offering first. And then my jaw hit the floor at "free egress bandwidth". Free egress bandwidth? Yes please. I will instantly convert. Then I was worried about price per GB. $0.015/GB is incredibly competitive. Good lord, where do I get early access to this thing? I'd transition all our infra today.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
forty 5y ago
We will see in practice how it is. As the article suggested, there are often caveats to "unlimited" and honestly I don't even think they have written unlimited anywhere :)
- aclelland 5y ago
  I think that when CF say unlimited bandwidth they really mean it. I manage a domain on the business level plan for a domain and I pushed over 1PB through it in January. Not a single complaint from CF and no sales calls pushing enterprise tier. They haven't clarified their file operations costs yet though. That could get pricy but will more than likely be cancelled out by the egress savings for most use cases.
  - Aea 5y ago
    Not saying your experience isn't true, but I've heard horror stories of accounts being disabled for using too much "non-HTML" bandwidth, even on business level ($200/month) accounts (at the single digit TB level). The limits seem to be arbitrary and ill defined. CF may be great technically, but I personally wouldn't use them without an enterprise agreement in place. Bandwidth should be cheap, but cheap does not equal free. Unless I had an enterprise agreement in place I'd rather work with a vendor that has a well defined usage-based pricing. I have a low appetite for risk, and usage-based pricing aligns incentives properly IMHO.
    - aclelland 5y ago
      Yes, you are right that an enterprise agreement is probably the safest approach and it's definitely something we have looked into since the beginning of the year. In our case, one of our games DAU went pretty crazy last Christmas which resulted in a huge increase in players (who all need to download hundreds of MB of data). Maybe if it'd continued for many months the situation would be different and that angry email from CF would have eventually arrived.
    - corobo 5y ago
      How long ago was that?
      - Aea 5y ago
        Came across these 3-4 years ago when I was doing research on whether CF would be viable for a previous company.
    - breakingcups 5y ago
      Yeah, that's why I haven't dared put them in front of my B2 buckets, even though they have the Bandwidth Alliance.
    - jonny_eh 5y ago
      > I personally wouldn't use them without an enterprise agreement in place That would depend on the use case I'd assume.
- fernandotakai 5y ago
  >As the article suggested, there are often caveats to "unlimited" and honestly I don't even think they have written unlimited anywhere :) CF already talked about egress pricing here https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/ i would say that when they talk unlimited, they actually mean it.
  - forty 5y ago
    Precisely my point is that I haven't seen "unlimited" mentioned either in the R2 announcement nor on your link. So it's not unlikely that it's going to be free egress up to X GB per month (possibly with X high enough that it's still cool)
sillysaurusx 5y ago
Responding to a deleted but interesting comment. Normally I wouldn't do this, but it's harmless enough: > Backblaze B2 transfer to Cloudflare is free egress due to bandwidth alliance and Cloudflare CDN is free egress. So you already kinda have that. Hmm... What does it mean to transfer to Cloudflare? That's interesting. I want free egress to my Hetzner servers. (4x16TB for $79EU/mo is unbeatable, primarily because Hetzner also has unlimited free egress bandwidth.) But if Cloudflare offers servers, I should look into that. Do they? Even if they do, what's their egress pricing? Thanks for the tip! (I've been wondering about B2's mysterious "computing partners" -- their computing partners get free egress, so it seems entirely plausible that Cloudflare might be one such computing partner. I just didn't realize that Cloudflare might do computing at all -- in my head, they were a proxy, not a server farm.)
- DeathArrow 5y ago
  They offer a serverless platform. If you want free egress, you can check Wasabi: https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/#three-info https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/#three-info
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    Thanks for pointing this out!
  - Polycryptus 5y ago
    I've been using Wasabi for a project where cost is more important than anything (i.e. a side project with reasonable scale that can't accept income) and on that front it is great. (S3 costs have been atrociously high to us sometimes.) For CDN-type resources we do a Wasabi bucket with Cloudflare with caching set very high. Reliability has been the only problem; it's not awful by any means, but there are a lot more "hiccups" using it. You get what you pay for, I guess. That said I'm looking to see if just using R2 is a big improvement. It'll cost more but the reliability and performance might be worth it for us.
  - NicoJuicy 5y ago
    Wasabi charges for your largest file for 3 months. You only get "free" egress for the size of your storage.
Eugr 5y ago
Did you have a look at rstor.io? They have free egress and even lower storage costs and also don't seem to charge for IOPS. Not as high profile as Cloudflare though.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  I haven't! Thank you for the tip!
- DeathArrow 5y ago
  Also Wasabi is worth checking. Free egress cheap prices. https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/#three-info https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/#three-info
  - breakingcups 5y ago
    If I recall correctly, that's only good up until the total storage. So if you store, say, 100GB of files total, you only have free egress up until 100GB/month
    - encryptluks2 5y ago
      Exactly... also, they have like a 3 month minimum storage time on a lot of their plans.
- Smerity 5y ago
  Thanks! I'd never seen them. The only minor catches that I've seen are that they want you to start the account with $50 or more added, it's $6 per TB per month (rounded up to the nearest TB) with a 90 day minimum duration, and you're allowed 1TB egress per day for each TB you have stored. They were also acquired very recently[2] though no clue how that might impact things. I'm fine with all those except the pre-loading $50 just to test, though that's as I want to test it personally. If I were using a business account that's not as much an issue. [1]: https://console.rstor.space/pricing https://console.rstor.space/pricing [2]: https://www.yahoo.com/now/packetfabric-announces-acquisition-rstor-110000153.html https://www.yahoo.com/now/packetfabric-announces-acquisition...
irrational 5y ago
Egress means files being requested, right? Is there a charge for sending files to the server (ingress)? Does this mean the only charge is the storage space?
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  This was one of the most surprising things, to me, before I learned about any of this stuff. inbound traffic (ingress) is free, almost universally. outbound traffic (egress) is $insane, almost universally. It's where most of the cloud providers make most of their money, as far as I can tell. I'm a fan of murdering egress fees, so therefore I am a fan of whatever Cloudflare R2 turns out to be. As long as they get rid of egress, I'll cheerlead them for life. (To answer your question more directly: "yes, I think so. At least in my experience.")
sydney6 5y ago
Backblaze, IIRC, doesn't distribute data across multiple regions.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jacurtis 5y ago
According to their press release it says: > That's why Cloudflare plans to eliminate egress fees, deliver object storage that is at least 10% cheaper than S3, and make infrequent access completely free for customers A few elements of concern. It says they "plan to", so we don't know if this is near term or some moonshot type of goal. It also states earlier in the press release that the free egress frees are offered via the "Bandwidth Alliance", which removes bandwidth charges between member providers. While it is noteworthy that GCP (Google Cloud Provider) and Microsoft Azure are part of this alliance, AWS is not! So does this mean that egress fees will be charged if an AWS server requests the file? I also don't know what to think about the statement that they plan to make infrequent access completely free... does that mean that I can throw files onto R2 for archive purposes and not pay anything? Because that is what it sounds like by that statement, but it obviously sounds impractical or too good to be true. Original Press Release: https://www.cloudflare.com/press-releases/2021/cloudflare-announces-r2-storage/ https://www.cloudflare.com/press-releases/2021/cloudflare-an...
- nemothekid 5y ago
  >While it is noteworthy that GCP (Google Cloud Provider) and Microsoft Azure are part of this alliance, AWS is not! So does this mean that egress fees will be charged if an AWS server requests the file? The bandwidth alliance means when Cloudflare requests a file from GCP, GCP won't charge you egress. Cloudflare will then deliver your file to your customer for free.
  - bbu 5y ago
    small correction: gcp will still charge you but at a reduced rate.
    - GordonS 5y ago
      Do you know how much the discount is? I was looking into this regarding Azure just yesterday, but it looks like they only discount the egress bandwidth by a pitiful 9% or so.
- greg-m 5y ago
anyfactor 5y ago
I googled what egress meant. > when that data is retrieved from the cloud, providers will then charge large fees; this is what’s known as a data egress. There are many cloud providers seem to be not charging for egress.
- the_duke 5y ago
  No, most cloud providers do not charge for ingress, but charge heavily for egress.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - anyfactor 5y ago
    I didn't mention or didn't know what ingress is. The full excerpt [0] > Most leading cloud providers allow their customers to input data into the cloud for free. However, when that data is retrieved from the cloud, these providers will then charge large fees; this is what’s known as a data egress. Here is what I found out about ingress [1] > Egress in the world of networking implies traffic that exits an entity or a network boundary, while Ingress is traffic that enters the boundary of a network. [0] https://wasabi.com/help/glossary-of-terms/egress-charges-definition/ https://wasabi.com/help/glossary-of-terms/egress-charges-def... [1] https://aviatrix.com/learn-center/cloud-security/egress-and-ingress/ https://aviatrix.com/learn-center/cloud-security/egress-and-...
    - sillysaurusx 5y ago
      no worries, it was all quite confusing to me too. I never had to worry about any of this stuff till accidentally racking up a $600 charge in one day by using a TPU pod to train on data in the wrong region. Here's the rule of thumb: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28775836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28775836 > inbound traffic (ingress) is free, almost universally. > outbound traffic (egress) is $insane, almost universally. so think of it like, teleport yourself to S3's servers. Any data that comes in, you charge $0. Any data that goes out, you charge $massive. This seems to be true for almost every provider I've found. Hetzner is one of the rare exceptions. If you need a server, get a Hetzner dedicated box, because it's unlimited traffic (both ingress and egress). It powers https://battle.shawwn.com/ https://battle.shawwn.com/ (big dump of files). I'd love to store things in S3 or GCE, but it's a non-starter, because transferring between GCE to Hetzner would cost $0.12/GB downloaded. 12 cents per GB! It doesn't sound like a lot till you do the math on 22TB. Hence, R2 is incredibly appealing. I'd love $0.015 per GB storage cost + free egress, because it means I can download as much as I want to my hetzner server. Meaning, I don't need to worry about my hetzner drives failing.
true_religion 5y ago
OVH storage is $0.0112/GB and egress is just $0.01/GB. Having egressed priced out is handy because then you can just use it directly. With Cloudflare you'd have to pay for the CDN separately for any real traffic amount.
hitekker 5y ago
B2 is also a lot slower egress than S3, by maybe an order of magnitude.
- prirun 5y ago
  I'm author of HashBackup and regularly run performance comparisons between object storage services. While I agree than S3 performance is generally better than B2, I personally have not seen a 10x difference in egress performance. Here's a test I recently ran comparing S3, B2, and Storj. The test uploads a 700MB backup, downloads it and rebuilds a database, then removes it. The test was run on a small 1 CPU, 512M Vultr VPS. S3 upload: 20.6s S3 download: 26s S3 remove: 1.2s B2 upload: 28.2s B2 download: 28.7s B2 remove: 4.0s Storj upload: 34.7s Storj download: 75.3s Storj remove: 20.6s B2 does have higher latency than S3, so for short operations like removing objects, S3 has higher performance. If your egress load is for a lot of small objects, I could see B2 being a lot slower. This shows up in my tests where removing 14 backup files is more than 3x slower on B2 than on S3. But even for this, I've never seen 10x slower. A footnote: the Storj tests are with a new driver so those numbers are preliminary results.
dcolkitt 5y ago
Free egress is huge for my data pipeline workloads. I hate getting silo-ed into a single cloud provider, because my data lives there and it's too expensive to run the compute jobs on another cloud due to the cost of moving the data. For example GCP has a much better Kubernetes offering than AWS, but everything's native to S3. So you get stuck using crappier products. If R2 offered free egress, I'd move the entire data lake there just to sidestep this problem.
mattjaynes 5y ago
As mentioned in another comment, don't forget to consider B2's weekly 2 hour maintenance windows during the US work day: https://www.backblaze.com/scheduled-maintenance.html https://www.backblaze.com/scheduled-maintenance.html
- atYevP 5y ago
  Yev from Backblaze here -> that maintenance window doesn't shut down the B2 Service each Thursday for two hours. We have lots of companies like Kanopy and Cloudspot that use us as an origin store without issue!
- nvahalik 5y ago
  This was the reason we ended up moving away from B2. It may be durable but their storage isn't a drop-in replacement for S3 or similar products. They are really an S3-compatible target for backup softwares.
  - SiVal 5y ago
    This would be fine for an automated system that could schedule requests or could fail, wait 30min, and try again. But it would be unusable by a human working interactively. You would constantly get complaints and monitor warnings that your "system is down". I don't mind services that cut price dramatically in exchange for only supporting some (not all) use cases. That can be a very attractive offer, but does Backblaze explicitly position B2 for non-interactive use cases?
kaixi 5y ago
B2 to Cloudflare egress is free, they are both part of Bandwidth Alliance: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/solutions/content-delivery.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/solutions/content-delivery.html
- austinpena 5y ago
  Answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28778286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28778286

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

forty 5y ago

We will see in practice how it is. As the article suggested, there are often caveats to "unlimited" and honestly I don't even think they have written unlimited anywhere :)

aclelland 5y ago
I think that when CF say unlimited bandwidth they really mean it. I manage a domain on the business level plan for a domain and I pushed over 1PB through it in January. Not a single complaint from CF and no sales calls pushing enterprise tier. They haven't clarified their file operations costs yet though. That could get pricy but will more than likely be cancelled out by the egress savings for most use cases.
- Aea 5y ago
  Not saying your experience isn't true, but I've heard horror stories of accounts being disabled for using too much "non-HTML" bandwidth, even on business level ($200/month) accounts (at the single digit TB level). The limits seem to be arbitrary and ill defined. CF may be great technically, but I personally wouldn't use them without an enterprise agreement in place. Bandwidth should be cheap, but cheap does not equal free. Unless I had an enterprise agreement in place I'd rather work with a vendor that has a well defined usage-based pricing. I have a low appetite for risk, and usage-based pricing aligns incentives properly IMHO.
  - aclelland 5y ago
    Yes, you are right that an enterprise agreement is probably the safest approach and it's definitely something we have looked into since the beginning of the year. In our case, one of our games DAU went pretty crazy last Christmas which resulted in a huge increase in players (who all need to download hundreds of MB of data). Maybe if it'd continued for many months the situation would be different and that angry email from CF would have eventually arrived.
  - corobo 5y ago
    How long ago was that?
    - Aea 5y ago
      Came across these 3-4 years ago when I was doing research on whether CF would be viable for a previous company.
  - breakingcups 5y ago
    Yeah, that's why I haven't dared put them in front of my B2 buckets, even though they have the Bandwidth Alliance.
  - jonny_eh 5y ago
    > I personally wouldn't use them without an enterprise agreement in place That would depend on the use case I'd assume.
fernandotakai 5y ago
>As the article suggested, there are often caveats to "unlimited" and honestly I don't even think they have written unlimited anywhere :) CF already talked about egress pricing here https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/ i would say that when they talk unlimited, they actually mean it.
- forty 5y ago
  Precisely my point is that I haven't seen "unlimited" mentioned either in the R2 announcement nor on your link. So it's not unlikely that it's going to be free egress up to X GB per month (possibly with X high enough that it's still cool)

sillysaurusx 5y ago

Responding to a deleted but interesting comment. Normally I wouldn't do this, but it's harmless enough: > Backblaze B2 transfer to Cloudflare is free egress due to bandwidth alliance and Cloudflare CDN is free egress. So you already kinda have that. Hmm... What does it mean to transfer to Cloudflare? That's interesting. I want free egress to my Hetzner servers. (4x16TB for $79EU/mo is unbeatable, primarily because Hetzner also has unlimited free egress bandwidth.) But if Cloudflare offers servers, I should look into that. Do they? Even if they do, what's their egress pricing? Thanks for the tip! (I've been wondering about B2's mysterious "computing partners" -- their computing partners get free egress, so it seems entirely plausible that Cloudflare might be one such computing partner. I just didn't realize that Cloudflare might do computing at all -- in my head, they were a proxy, not a server farm.)

DeathArrow 5y ago
They offer a serverless platform. If you want free egress, you can check Wasabi: https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/#three-info https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/#three-info
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  Thanks for pointing this out!
- Polycryptus 5y ago
  I've been using Wasabi for a project where cost is more important than anything (i.e. a side project with reasonable scale that can't accept income) and on that front it is great. (S3 costs have been atrociously high to us sometimes.) For CDN-type resources we do a Wasabi bucket with Cloudflare with caching set very high. Reliability has been the only problem; it's not awful by any means, but there are a lot more "hiccups" using it. You get what you pay for, I guess. That said I'm looking to see if just using R2 is a big improvement. It'll cost more but the reliability and performance might be worth it for us.
- NicoJuicy 5y ago
  Wasabi charges for your largest file for 3 months. You only get "free" egress for the size of your storage.

Eugr 5y ago

Did you have a look at rstor.io? They have free egress and even lower storage costs and also don't seem to charge for IOPS. Not as high profile as Cloudflare though.

sillysaurusx 5y ago
I haven't! Thank you for the tip!
DeathArrow 5y ago
Also Wasabi is worth checking. Free egress cheap prices. https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/#three-info https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/#three-info
- breakingcups 5y ago
  If I recall correctly, that's only good up until the total storage. So if you store, say, 100GB of files total, you only have free egress up until 100GB/month
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    Exactly... also, they have like a 3 month minimum storage time on a lot of their plans.
Smerity 5y ago
Thanks! I'd never seen them. The only minor catches that I've seen are that they want you to start the account with $50 or more added, it's $6 per TB per month (rounded up to the nearest TB) with a 90 day minimum duration, and you're allowed 1TB egress per day for each TB you have stored. They were also acquired very recently[2] though no clue how that might impact things. I'm fine with all those except the pre-loading $50 just to test, though that's as I want to test it personally. If I were using a business account that's not as much an issue. [1]: https://console.rstor.space/pricing https://console.rstor.space/pricing [2]: https://www.yahoo.com/now/packetfabric-announces-acquisition-rstor-110000153.html https://www.yahoo.com/now/packetfabric-announces-acquisition...

irrational 5y ago

Egress means files being requested, right? Is there a charge for sending files to the server (ingress)? Does this mean the only charge is the storage space?

sillysaurusx 5y ago
This was one of the most surprising things, to me, before I learned about any of this stuff. inbound traffic (ingress) is free, almost universally. outbound traffic (egress) is $insane, almost universally. It's where most of the cloud providers make most of their money, as far as I can tell. I'm a fan of murdering egress fees, so therefore I am a fan of whatever Cloudflare R2 turns out to be. As long as they get rid of egress, I'll cheerlead them for life. (To answer your question more directly: "yes, I think so. At least in my experience.")

sydney6 5y ago

Backblaze, IIRC, doesn't distribute data across multiple regions.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

jacurtis 5y ago

According to their press release it says: > That's why Cloudflare plans to eliminate egress fees, deliver object storage that is at least 10% cheaper than S3, and make infrequent access completely free for customers A few elements of concern. It says they "plan to", so we don't know if this is near term or some moonshot type of goal. It also states earlier in the press release that the free egress frees are offered via the "Bandwidth Alliance", which removes bandwidth charges between member providers. While it is noteworthy that GCP (Google Cloud Provider) and Microsoft Azure are part of this alliance, AWS is not! So does this mean that egress fees will be charged if an AWS server requests the file? I also don't know what to think about the statement that they plan to make infrequent access completely free... does that mean that I can throw files onto R2 for archive purposes and not pay anything? Because that is what it sounds like by that statement, but it obviously sounds impractical or too good to be true. Original Press Release: https://www.cloudflare.com/press-releases/2021/cloudflare-announces-r2-storage/ https://www.cloudflare.com/press-releases/2021/cloudflare-an...

nemothekid 5y ago
>While it is noteworthy that GCP (Google Cloud Provider) and Microsoft Azure are part of this alliance, AWS is not! So does this mean that egress fees will be charged if an AWS server requests the file? The bandwidth alliance means when Cloudflare requests a file from GCP, GCP won't charge you egress. Cloudflare will then deliver your file to your customer for free.
- bbu 5y ago
  small correction: gcp will still charge you but at a reduced rate.
  - GordonS 5y ago
    Do you know how much the discount is? I was looking into this regarding Azure just yesterday, but it looks like they only discount the egress bandwidth by a pitiful 9% or so.
greg-m 5y ago

anyfactor 5y ago

I googled what egress meant. > when that data is retrieved from the cloud, providers will then charge large fees; this is what’s known as a data egress. There are many cloud providers seem to be not charging for egress.

the_duke 5y ago
No, most cloud providers do not charge for ingress, but charge heavily for egress.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- anyfactor 5y ago
  I didn't mention or didn't know what ingress is. The full excerpt [0] > Most leading cloud providers allow their customers to input data into the cloud for free. However, when that data is retrieved from the cloud, these providers will then charge large fees; this is what’s known as a data egress. Here is what I found out about ingress [1] > Egress in the world of networking implies traffic that exits an entity or a network boundary, while Ingress is traffic that enters the boundary of a network. [0] https://wasabi.com/help/glossary-of-terms/egress-charges-definition/ https://wasabi.com/help/glossary-of-terms/egress-charges-def... [1] https://aviatrix.com/learn-center/cloud-security/egress-and-ingress/ https://aviatrix.com/learn-center/cloud-security/egress-and-...
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    no worries, it was all quite confusing to me too. I never had to worry about any of this stuff till accidentally racking up a $600 charge in one day by using a TPU pod to train on data in the wrong region. Here's the rule of thumb: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28775836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28775836 > inbound traffic (ingress) is free, almost universally. > outbound traffic (egress) is $insane, almost universally. so think of it like, teleport yourself to S3's servers. Any data that comes in, you charge $0. Any data that goes out, you charge $massive. This seems to be true for almost every provider I've found. Hetzner is one of the rare exceptions. If you need a server, get a Hetzner dedicated box, because it's unlimited traffic (both ingress and egress). It powers https://battle.shawwn.com/ https://battle.shawwn.com/ (big dump of files). I'd love to store things in S3 or GCE, but it's a non-starter, because transferring between GCE to Hetzner would cost $0.12/GB downloaded. 12 cents per GB! It doesn't sound like a lot till you do the math on 22TB. Hence, R2 is incredibly appealing. I'd love $0.015 per GB storage cost + free egress, because it means I can download as much as I want to my hetzner server. Meaning, I don't need to worry about my hetzner drives failing.

true_religion 5y ago

OVH storage is $0.0112/GB and egress is just $0.01/GB. Having egressed priced out is handy because then you can just use it directly. With Cloudflare you'd have to pay for the CDN separately for any real traffic amount.

hitekker 5y ago

B2 is also a lot slower egress than S3, by maybe an order of magnitude.

prirun 5y ago
I'm author of HashBackup and regularly run performance comparisons between object storage services. While I agree than S3 performance is generally better than B2, I personally have not seen a 10x difference in egress performance. Here's a test I recently ran comparing S3, B2, and Storj. The test uploads a 700MB backup, downloads it and rebuilds a database, then removes it. The test was run on a small 1 CPU, 512M Vultr VPS. S3 upload: 20.6s S3 download: 26s S3 remove: 1.2s B2 upload: 28.2s B2 download: 28.7s B2 remove: 4.0s Storj upload: 34.7s Storj download: 75.3s Storj remove: 20.6s B2 does have higher latency than S3, so for short operations like removing objects, S3 has higher performance. If your egress load is for a lot of small objects, I could see B2 being a lot slower. This shows up in my tests where removing 14 backup files is more than 3x slower on B2 than on S3. But even for this, I've never seen 10x slower. A footnote: the Storj tests are with a new driver so those numbers are preliminary results.

dcolkitt 5y ago

Free egress is huge for my data pipeline workloads. I hate getting silo-ed into a single cloud provider, because my data lives there and it's too expensive to run the compute jobs on another cloud due to the cost of moving the data. For example GCP has a much better Kubernetes offering than AWS, but everything's native to S3. So you get stuck using crappier products. If R2 offered free egress, I'd move the entire data lake there just to sidestep this problem.

mattjaynes 5y ago

As mentioned in another comment, don't forget to consider B2's weekly 2 hour maintenance windows during the US work day: https://www.backblaze.com/scheduled-maintenance.html https://www.backblaze.com/scheduled-maintenance.html

atYevP 5y ago
Yev from Backblaze here -> that maintenance window doesn't shut down the B2 Service each Thursday for two hours. We have lots of companies like Kanopy and Cloudspot that use us as an origin store without issue!
nvahalik 5y ago
This was the reason we ended up moving away from B2. It may be durable but their storage isn't a drop-in replacement for S3 or similar products. They are really an S3-compatible target for backup softwares.
- SiVal 5y ago
  This would be fine for an automated system that could schedule requests or could fail, wait 30min, and try again. But it would be unusable by a human working interactively. You would constantly get complaints and monitor warnings that your "system is down". I don't mind services that cut price dramatically in exchange for only supporting some (not all) use cases. That can be a very attractive offer, but does Backblaze explicitly position B2 for non-interactive use cases?

kaixi 5y ago

B2 to Cloudflare egress is free, they are both part of Bandwidth Alliance: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/solutions/content-delivery.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/solutions/content-delivery.html

austinpena 5y ago
Answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28778286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28778286