Egregious Egress and Disruption

You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave!

– Hotel California, by The Eagles

A few days ago, Cloudflare announced its R2 cloud storage service. It's an API that lets you store and request data, implementing the industry-standard format from AWS S3. But Cloudflare's offering is disruptive to AWS. Why?

AWS's pricing model for storage is per GB (TB). Each request (e.g., get/put/delete) also incurs a flat charge. The most important (and often overlooked) fee is for bandwidth.

Storage isn't getting that much cheaper. And neither is AWS S3.

What's are the implications?

(h/t Peter Cai for the graph) pic.twitter.com/ZdZrgIh8bQ

— Matt Rickard (@mattrickard) March 18, 2021