Cloudflare partners with Microsoft, Google and others to reduce bandwidth costs | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflare partners with Microsoft, Google and others to reduce bandwidth costs

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123 pointsjgrahamc49 comments

It's funny that this has just been announced, as I was doing an audit of our outgoing bandwidth costs and saw that our data being flagged as outgoing data in our Azure Service Plans was much much lower compared to our other data center despite Azure having larger sites. The key difference was that Cloudflare had been implemented on our Azure webapps, but not on the other data center sites. I'm not sure if this has been happening for a while for Azure and is just being announced or if it's pure coincidence.

Either way I am a happy user of both Azure and Cloudflare. Anecdotally though I have also noticed on Cloudflare as they have moved to more pricing models that uncached hits on free plans have increased while our higher plans have fallen/remained the same. That too could be coincidence or a need for rule changes.

I also wonder how this will effect using CDNs from Azure Edge, Akamai, etc. Are those included in the bandwidth alliance?

Is that because you have tiered caching on for your paid plans?

I'm not sure, it could just be a bad sample size on the free sites I have through Cloudflare. I will hopefully be reviewing those soon to see if it feels more widespread. It could just be a rule set incorrectly in the few I've glanced at. No doubt that though paid tiers can high caching hits, especially if you enable Argo.

Argo by itself does not improve hit rate, but that's often coming with tiered caching. Source: I work on the cache team at cloudflare

Doesn't Argo come with tiered caching? At least according to your marketing materials it helps increase cache hit ratios.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/argo/

"Customers enabling Argo can expect to see a 60% reduction in their cache miss rate as compared to Cloudflare’s traditional CDN service."

Typically yes. But you can have Argo without tiered caching and for Enterprise level also tiered caching without Argo

Amazon is noticeably absent. I would love to know what percent of their profit comes from their egregious egress rates.

There are price comparison tools like http://www.ucxmarket.com that can help make prices more transparent.

We switched to DirectConnect for egress and saved literally 80% overnight...

I talked to a network engineer at AWS a while back about it and he said it was one of their biggest profit centers with around a 90% margin.

Blog has more details: https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/

Y'all realize this is basically "we're going to stop net neutrality", right? That it's anti-competitive with CDN's that don't sign the contract, just like everybody got bent out of shape with COX doing?

How does this have anything to do with net neutrality? Nobody is filtering the traffic, it's all equal.

You can use whatever provider you want, but customers will probably choose the ones that provide greater value instead of paying the ridiculous bandwidth markups by the rest.

I don't trust this one bit. Bandwidth costs make or break implimenting ideas, and service agreements like this can just stop at any time. Cloudflare cannot be the only service that gets this. The fact that cloud providers won't reduce their costs independently tells you they're not doing this to reduce prices. It's marketing, and they're making money on it. When cloud providers start to encroach on cloudflares territory it'll also be a conflict of interest and this deal will be gone.

Id be happy if cloud providers reduced bandwidth costs for cached assets even.

Uh .. of course they're going to make money off of it? Cloudflare is going to get new paying customers, and the partners will probably get something out of it too. That's a no-brainer, nothing is truly free.

I'm not a network guy, but can someone explain how this is more significant than a multi-lateral peering agreement?

Even with peering in place behind the scenes, cloud providers would still usually charge for egress from storage and cdn services to a provider like cloudflare.

What Cloudflare et al are doing here is utilizing the peering connections that they have already in place and not billing at the usual egress rate when traffic routes over these peering connections.

Peering has been in place for a long time between cloud providers. However, the cloud providers have charged their customers the same amount regardless of whether traffic is sent across transit (which they pay incrementally for) or peering (which they don’t). The Bandwidth Alliance does two things: 1) cloud providers agree to waive or substantially discount the price of bandwidth for their customers when passing over peered connections; and 2) Cloudflare hauls the traffic at no cost to customers to the nearest location where it can be passed over a peered connection. The net effect is customers’ bandwidth bills are substantially decreased and it becomes far more affordable to move data from one cloud to another.

One service which many cloud provides include in their egress fees is transferring data through their network to close to the other end. This can improve performance as the cloud provider often has a better private network than the public internet.

This service is also one that Cloudflare provides, except they don't charge for it. It sounds like what is happening here is that the cloud providers are egressing close to the end within their network directly to Cloudflare, who is then doing the more expensive work of transferring the data to close to the other end. This makes the traffic like intra-regional traffic for the cloud provider, which is often free or deeply discounted.

I just want to make sure: this means that if you are using cloudflare in front of, for example, backblaze to serve static assets, that you will have 0 egress fees to pay? No catch?

You would get zero egress from Backblaze, but Cloudflare (or whomever is the eyeball facing provider) will still meter your bandwidth/requests/etc at their edge -> client.

Cloudflare offers unmetered bandwidth, so this should remove any bandwidth costs completely.

https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200172656-D...

Yeah, that's why this is almost unbelievable. What a day. Thanks for the reverse birthday present

That's not quite true. Some of their products (Argo; their virtual backbone service) bills on GB; others on requests. That's still going to apply, and it's also going to apply for larger customers on contract.

Once you reach a certain level of traffic (a lot of TBs/month) going through their reverse proxy they will have someone from sales reach out to you and make you to start paying.

Wait, does this mean it's now possible to get completely free egress from B2 to all of the other providers listed? (and also the public internet via cloudflare?)

That would massively reduce potential B2 costs...

Yes.

>Wait, does this mean it's now possible to get completely free egress from B2 to all of the other providers listed? (and also the public internet via cloudflare?)

Can some one please explain this like I am three years old. For example, Free transfer from B2 to Linode? And from Linode to Cloudflare? I know bandwidth was suppose to be cheap, and many Cloud providers are charging a lot for their profits, but this completely eliminate it.

When something is too good to be true, you cant help to be skeptical about it.

Correct. There's no catch.

As an aside, typical wholesale prices in the US, for moving 200gb of data is about 50 cents, or less. So what is current cloud pricing for 200 gb of egress?

Yev from Backblaze here -> We charge $0.01/gb for egress. With this Alliance announcement, that'll be $0.00 from Backblaze B2 to Cloudflare. We have similar partnerships in place with Packet and ServerCentral already!

Not exactly a fair comparison to other Cloud providers on cost for egress, since you largely just do backups. So most data is incoming rather than outgoing. I assume you don't charge for incoming data either, and most providers don't...just adding a caveat as to why you are so so cheap compared to AWS and Azure.

Our Online Backup service is primarily for backing up computers, but Backblaze B2 is used for a wide variety of things including origin-stores, and those use-cases are pretty in-line with what folks use Azure and GCS for - so should be pretty similar - unless I misunderstood!

I guess I should say I mean you aren't offering compute services so you probably have less egress than the others, afiak. Just a wild guess.

AWS starts at $0.15/GB, so $30. It's an unbelievable ripoff, particularly given if AWS is peered with your destination they are actually paying $0.

> they are actually paying $0

Nope, they have to pay transport to the peering point (or own it).

How much is a 10 gigabit peer connection? I know you can buy 1 Gb connections for $500/m at some datacenters.

Plus the rack at one of the supported colo neutral of the peering exchange say $800mo usually an equinix or telehouss,plus the cross connect $300mo, plus redudant protected circuits to your data center from the incumbents, plus juniper/Cisco/arista 100gb gear, HA/failover double the prior, plus your onsite hands or remote hands, plus the SFPs and sparwa, plus insurance plus all sorts of shit just for a NAP - presuming you don't have one already at said location.

There a lot more to costs than pricelist for LINx, or Deix or whatever advertise. this a great announcement from cloudflare

If you don't have a rack full of equipment you don't need to pay for a full rack. How much bandwidth can a single 10gb port handle? Literally 10000 times 200gb in a month.

I have a dedicated server with a colo provider that has its own 10GB connection. Most definitely don't need a full rack of gear.

Do Telehouse / Equinix facilities do half racks nowadays at their NAP orientated facilities? I'm sure they do at their subrate places but not as many choices (rephrased s/subrate/acquired: ones they've acquired over the years, but they're poor for connectivity)

I'm not talking about peering, or transit. I'm talking about transport.

They already own it with their global network, and their customers already pay for the infrastructure and capacity. The per-use bandwidth costs are pure profit.

Azure is $0.08/GB, which still seems high

In what region? I see $0.09/GB as the starting price for the first 1 TB.

Granted it’s still way overpriced but it’d be $18, not $30.

For one of my products this is single handedly 50% of our costs on AWS.

There goes any level of free speech...

I'm not sure I follow, but Cloudflare has a history of being a strong defender of free speech. They even defended Neo-Nazis.

https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-cloudflare/

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