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Comment by polote | Hacker News Reader

I know that Cloudflare is always very liked on HN and the CTO often comments here. I often refer to friends that Cloudflare only exists thanks to HN. But Cloudflare is not (neither HN) the center of the world you could have better than R2 with B2 before for example.

And no they didnt disrupted anything. You dont disrupt anything in one week actually. Has R2 had any impact on S3 business model or customers so far ? Probably not.

Not saying Cloudflare is a bad company, I believe it is one of the few (maybe with Stripe) that is able to still work as a startup even though they have thousands of employees, which is quite impressive. But the article is clickbait

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I think calling it clickbait is too harsh. The right headline would be: "Cloudflare announces 3 changes which have the potential to disrupt 3 industries in the near/long future". So it's somewhere in the middle between "totally describing what's inside" vs. clickbait-y.

The R2 disruption is a reduction in cost. The target of the disruption is Amazon, a company that has decades of experience operating services at break-even or loss to acquire market share.

Quite a lot of the coverage seems founded on the idea that the price difference is an unbridgeable moat for Cloudflare. IMO, let’s see. Amazon could lower prices, and/or Cloudflare might need to start charging someone something as volume grows.

If Amazon has to remove egress fees to compete, wouldn't that be a pretty significant disruption to the industry as well? The author's argument isn't that Cloudflare is going to take S3 out of business, it's that removing egress fees makes a whole new class of applications viable. I don't see how the S3 removing egress fees as well would change that argument—it would still be Cloudflare that pushed the storage industry to this new place. In fact, S3 having to remove egress fees to compete would be probably be greater evidence for Cloudflare's disruptive effect :P

This definitely isn't a disruption in the academic sense of the term: https://hbr.org/2015/12/what-is-disruptive-innovation

But even in the casual sense I don't think it's disruptive. They've introduced a competing service at a modestly lower cost. This won't put AWS out of business. Customers won't switch away en masse. It even won't make a noticeable dent in AWS's quarterly revenues.

So this isn't disruption. it's bog-standard business competition. Which I very much welcome.

It's more than modestly lower though in some use cases.

https://twitter.com/quinnypig/status/1443028078196711426

Corey compares the cost of storing 1gb of data in s3 vs r2 and serving it to the internet:

> If 1 million people download that 1GB this month, my cost with @cloudflare R2 this way rounds up to 13¢. With @awscloud S3 it’s [$53,891.16]

Who do you see as current AWS customers paying bills like that? My guess is that's very niche. People who expect to use petabytes of bandwidth rarely just throw things on AWS and eat the bills. And if they do, then it sounds like they wouldn't be moved to switch anyhow.

Not current aws customers, but a friend's company basically built out their own cdn to avoid these charges. They're something like twitch -- lots of videos, lots of viewers.

Paying a fraction (there will obviously be charges beyond the $.09) but still a fraction of aws charges would have been revolutionary for them.

I think most people in that bucket knows not to serve in bulk from AWS and so just use existing CDNs. (Or, as you say, builds their own.) A good fraction of Cloudflare's business has to be fronting things that are in AWS.

For this to be disruptive, there has to be a significant amount of business that will move from AWS to Cloudflare because of this change.

I think you are underestimating what it could do when they have a complete cloud offering.

And since there are no egress fees, there is no barrier to use a competing product that does something better.

It's like they are launching without vendor lock-in. So I do think it's disruptive, not based on costs alone.

If they ever get a complete cloud offering, that might be disruptive. But I don't think this is disruptive now. If you do, please be specific about the customer segments you think will be switching over the next 6 months and what your estimated impact is to AWS's $15 billion in quarterly revenue.

I think you didn't totally read my comment.

No more vendor lock-in because of removal of egress fees. Means they can actually obtain the first-mover advantage and they don't really need a complete offering.

I can't say that i know the impact on AWS in only 6 months. No one can, so they question seems somewhat ridiculous, since it's too little time.

+ The global cloud market is still growing.

I did read it, thanks.

That you can't see any short-term impact is exactly my point. Nothing significant will change, so this is not a disruptive innovation. It's a minor incremental change in the market. Might it enable something disruptive down the road? Possibly. But that's possible, not actual. If you want to more about what disruptive means in this context, I'd suggest reading one of Clay Christensen's books or the article I linked up above.

I'm mostly talking about significant impact on AWS ( revenue) within 6 months. Which is not realistic in that time frame.

I see a way for cloudflare to innovate based on dropping egress fees. But I'm not sure if i can drop my hunch this early. I think i can wrap it up with " empowering open-source".

I'll see if the future unravels in that direction. There are additional products required for that path to fulfill and I think a 6 month timeline is kinda short for that.

I agree it's not realistic. Or even within a year. Which means this is not a disruptive change on it's own. Could there be other changes made by Cloudflare that are disruptive? Sure. Could they make use of this? Also yes. But this on its own will not cause significant customer movement.

Well, that's because no big customer will be able to change their platform within 6 months.

Not a single innovation could.

Calling it clickbait is generous

> I think calling it clickbait is too harsh. The right headline would be: "Cloudflare announces 3 changes which have the potential to disrupt 3 industries in the near/long future".

That's still quite the stretch. A pricing update to not charge egress fees for object storage and some types of streaming is hardly "disruptive", as is catering to the web3 buzzword.

I like Cloudflare, but these marketing blurbs start to eat away the goodwill that Cloudflare's technical progresses earn with their hard and quality work.

Note, the author isn't affiliated with Cloudflare. It's not a marketing blurb, this is how people actually talk in SV apparently ;)

Doubt there's an affiliation. The whole article is written from a perspective of how founders can use these features to build their MVPs faster (curious how nobody in the comments mentioned this).

> A pricing update to not charge egress fees for object storage and some types of streaming is hardly "disruptive"

Hum. Do you think the largest cloud providers can outcompete that without completely changing their business plans?

Egress costs are always described as the ultimate cloud moat, and the main way those companies lock their clients. I do think there is enough space to disagree here (personally, I have no idea), but the mainstream view is that it fits the (econ-)dictionary definition of disruptive.

Agree obviously but I think the message is conveyed about what is interesting.

They are competing everywhere CDN, Zero Trust / EdgeSec, Edge Computing, Hosting, etc...

Anyone can think of any good historical good case studies on companies doing this in the past? Like becoming oversaturated, not focusing on one thing enough, or just growing like wild fire across spaces?

They seem to be massively diving into anything that can be computed/stored on the edge, and/or can benefit from a high performance network behind that edge. Which makes sense.

Also, they make quite smart choices. An example of one very smart choice is that they don't do Docker for cloud computation, only Javascript/WebASM, and that means they can spin up code in Isolates in V8 that's much more lightweight than having all the infra needed to do Docker.

Having said that, said smart choice is also an alternative source of lockin, given their egress charges are minimal.

> And no they didnt disrupted anything. You dont disrupt anything in one week actually. Has R2 had any impact on S3 business model or customers so far ? Probably not.

Cloud egress costs are the primary lock-in mechanism for cloud providers and that's been recognized as such for many years. This isn't the kind of thing which changes an industry in less than a week but I doubt you will want to defend this claim a year from now — Cloudflare is an established, rather popular company which many large organizations already trust and this gave them either significant savings or a big negotiating crowbar.

Cloudflare has always had free bandwidth and you can point the origin to whatever you want, including Backblaze which has free interconnect and cheaper pricing.

> Cloudflare has always had free bandwidth and you can point the origin to whatever you want.

Not completely: if you used a ton of bandwidth (especially non-HTML/JSON) they'd want you to switch to a paid plan.

Using an arbitrary origin server is similarly different, too: that means a lot more traffic coming back to your origin server unless all of your clients are located right next to each other hitting the same edge node. The mechanism they built to do an on-demand copy from S3 to R2 once and serve all subsequent requests from the replicated R2 copy should use substantially less bandwidth and will be faster for all of the requests received from clients which are closer to one of the R2 replicas than your origin server.

> Cloudflare has always had free bandwidth

Only for HTML content. [1] That is the real disruption here.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682885

> I believe it is one of the few (maybe with Stripe) that is able to still work as a startup even though they have thousands of employees, which is quite impressive.

You wouldn't call it impressive if you had to wait >24h for a support response as a user with an enterprise package. I'd call it quite the opposite from my experience with them at my previous job.

You could say the same about Tesla.

But cloudflare is able to scale fast at least.

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