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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
>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.
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!
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.
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.
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)
They stopped protecting them, and it looks like it might have been because they were eyeing this partnership. Microsoft threatened to remove services for Gab because they didn't like what some of the users were saying. I don't necessarily agree with any of those people's opinions on things, but it's a canary in the coal mine. Microsoft and Google are anti-free speech, and if Cloudflare starts relying on them, they can threaten to remove services if Cloudflare doesn't kiss the ring and do what they're told (i.e. censor thought crimes).
Yeah... Of course! To join this marketing alliance, Google decided, more than a year ago, to demand that CF sever ties with exactly one of their customers.
Apart from how wacky that conspiracy theory is: Do you believe you can devalue Cloudflare's stated motivation by replacing it with a financial motive instead?
Because it would seem to me that your theory would just shift that moral motivation to Google, no?
Unless, of course, Google themselves are in turn pressured by some even more powerful group. Who's that? George Soros? Hillary Clinton?
You can wave your arms and shout "conspiracy! conspiracy!" like a mad man if you want, but that won't change facts and what's really going on.
You're acting smug and condescending because you think you're right, but the reality is that you are the one that doesn't know what you're talking about.
Maybe someday Netflix will release a documentary that wraps up all the facts and puts a bow on it for you and you'll be able to understand it.
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?
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."
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.
Id be happy if cloud providers reduced bandwidth costs for cached assets even.
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.
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.
https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200172656-D...
That would massively reduce potential B2 costs...
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.
Nope, they have to pay transport to the peering point (or own it).
There a lot more to costs than pricelist for LINx, or Deix or whatever advertise. this a great announcement from cloudflare
Granted it’s still way overpriced but it’d be $18, not $30.
https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-cloudflare/
Apart from how wacky that conspiracy theory is: Do you believe you can devalue Cloudflare's stated motivation by replacing it with a financial motive instead?
Because it would seem to me that your theory would just shift that moral motivation to Google, no?
Unless, of course, Google themselves are in turn pressured by some even more powerful group. Who's that? George Soros? Hillary Clinton?
You can wave your arms and shout "conspiracy! conspiracy!" like a mad man if you want, but that won't change facts and what's really going on.
You're acting smug and condescending because you think you're right, but the reality is that you are the one that doesn't know what you're talking about.
Maybe someday Netflix will release a documentary that wraps up all the facts and puts a bow on it for you and you'll be able to understand it.