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.
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.
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]
Paying a fraction (there will obviously be charges beyond the $.09) but still a fraction of aws charges would have been revolutionary for them.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Not a single innovation could.
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.
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.