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Comment by gsanderson | Hacker News Reader

The margin on bandwidth is enormous. I think Cloudflare did some research into it a while back. But there are rivals providing cheaper S3-compatible storage at scale. Cloudflare's R2 ($15/TB, and no fees for egress). Oracle Cloud Storage ($25/TB, and first 10TB of egress is free). There's Wasabi ($5.99/TB, and no fees for egress or API requests). To name but three. Of course each of those have drawbacks e.g Wasabi is intended for long-term storage, R2 is still in beta etc. But there are options for new data.

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I didn't realize Cloudflare R2 was available yet. Took a look based on your mention... "currently in beta". But you can still just sign up and use it already?

Anyone here done that and want to report back?

Ah, I found this posted by it's author elsewhere in these threads:

https://www.vantage.sh/blog/cloudflare-r2-aws-s3-comparison

Very useful. Wait.... "no public access" AND "no pre-signed URLs"? Am I misunderstanding what that means? That would seem to make this not use cases of serving files to end-users? or what am I missing?

I haven't used it, but my understanding from reading about it is that the intended use-case is to create a Worker (roughly equivalent to an AWS Lambda) that mediates access to the bucket. So you could have the worker provide public access, or have the worker do some kind of authentication — you just have to roll that part yourself.

They plan on adding features so you don't need to use workers.

See the last section of this article: https://blog.cloudflare.com/r2-open-beta/

Thanks!

Also interesting to see that a future goal is: "Integration with Cloudflare’s cache, to scale read requests and provide global distribution of data."

I had wrongly assumed that would be the whole point of R2, that it would do that out the gate!

I haven't used it either but it certainly sounds like it's open to anyone to use. As @chc mentions, it reads like you use a Worker to control access. So you can make your files public by simply not requiring any authentication. I've just been scrolling through their getting started guide. It looks promising: https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/get-started

We do have presigned URLs actually. Public buckets coming soon

Thanks! That may meet all my requirements...

Although one of my use cases is video files (fairly small non-profit usage), which I have understood are not allowed by CloudFlare CDN terms of service (at least at non-"enterprise" tiers?)... it's been confusing to me understanding if I could, for example, serve video files from Backblaze via CloudFlare CDN and Bandwidth Alliance; or with R2, if there's a way to serve video files from R2 to the public that is allowed by tos.

Yes you can serve whatever you want from R2 directly. From [1]:

> The Cloudflare Developer Platform consists of the following Services: (i) Cloudflare Workers, a Service that permits developers to deploy and run encapsulated versions of their proprietary software source code (each a “Workers Script”) on Cloudflare’s edge servers; (ii) Cloudflare Pages, a JAMstack platform for frontend developers to collaborate and deploy websites; and (iii) Workers KV, Durable Objects, and R2, storage offerings used to serve HTML and non-HTML content.

Now it’s important to note that the Cache product does not fall into these supplemental terms (even if you use the Workers API to access it). So if you are Caching the video files you’d potentially run into problems (but that would also be true of serving video content from Blackblaze that you were caching).

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/supplemental-terms/#cloudflare-de...

Thanks this is helpful.

Delivering video files without caching them is probably a mistake, of course!

Sadly this dose not speak about data-integrity via eg. CRC.

Also I don't like it 1mm that I cants see how often and where my data is replicated

Overlooked this question:

> But you can still just sign up and use it already

Yes. You can just enter a credit card & start using it.

> I think Cloudflare did some research into it a while back

I remember! They called it the Bandwidth Alliance https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/

Yes! That was it. There was a blog post too with the estimated markup: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/

Wasabi's egress is not fully free as you make it sound. Their egress works like this: if you store 1 TB of data, you have 1 TB of free egress, as seen in their FAQ [0]. This means it's unfit for certain cases and another competitor could be a better option.

[0]: https://wasabi.com/paygo-pricing-faq/

You are correct, that would be another example of one of _its_ drawbacks. They certainly promote "No Fees for Egress" and "No egress charges" (home page). But yes, whether that actually is the case depends on your usage.

> and no fees for egress

This is somewhat wrong. You have to serve R2 Objects via a Worker which will cost you something per hit.

So you have a kind of egress fee.

True, it should be no fee for egress _bandwidth_. But yes, some form of egress fee (because of the fetch/get operation).

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