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Cloudflare: Introducing Bandwidth Alliance
CloudFlare unveils a partnership with providers such as DigitalOcean and Linode to waive bandwidth transfer costs for CloudFlare customers.
Comments
TIL Scaleway was founded since 2005. Maybe I was just a kid back then.
I think this might go against the net neutrality in the EU, although I'm not sure.
I'm curious if the customer will need to opt in, and if so what information they'll have to go? If it's automatic, then this is a nice feature - I don't think it's really game changing. A good CDN shouldn't require significant amounts of traffic to the origin anyway.
However, if it's opt-in - and requires the customer to provide some information - as a service provider I'd be really worried about how much data CloudFlare is collecting on my customers.
Exactly.
Also, what is scaleway doing there? They already offer unlimited transfer.
What changes? Double unlimited transfer to cloudflare customers?
No no no no. No no no no. No no there's no limit.
No no limits, we'll reach for the sky
No problem. We could always go to outer space to find another race.
space storage!
Well Cloudflare isn't just a standard CDN, it's a complete reverse-proxy so all http traffic goes through their connection.
Some people even put Cloudflare in front of like a Plex install to get better routing from remote servers across continents - since your traffic goes through direct peering, over their optimized routes, and then back out through direct peering to your ISP in most cases. So depending on what you're doing there can be significant savings here, even if it's stuff that can't be cached at their edge.
Cloudflare will enable a "basic version of Argo", which should help with routing for FR Kimsufi Linux-distro-ISO boxes.
My $0.02:
Big Winner:
Backblaze. The cheapest storage with SLA today is Online.net C14, but C14 is COLD storage and is not suitable for intensive distribution. AWS S3 is great, but not cheap regarding the price for storing and traffic. The waiving of traffic fee would probably make B2 the cheapest solution for static content distributing, as 1) storage for B2 is $0.005/GB/Month - cheaper than C14 intensive and 2) Cloudflare will save (potentially huge chunk of) operation cost for B2, which is already cheap. Imagine a Plex Linux-distro-ISO server running on DigitalOcean / Linode with storage mounted on B2... Maybe the only issue is the time for the first byte on large files.
Good for them:
DigitalOcean & Linode: It's been a while since DigitalOcean(DO) started to billing traffic. For websites on DO and Linode, there is no NEED to move the static content to outside CDN. Another interesting case would be using DO / Linode with Cloudflare for VPN - check SoftEther(over HTTPS) and V2Ray(TLS + WebSocket mode). Or, setup a powerful streaming broadcast server with HLS for a fraction of cost. There may be more potentials and I would love to see more interesting usages.
Neutral:
Google: Don't know whether there will be more price reduction as Google is already giving Cloudflare users a discount on traffic.
Azure: No detailed pricing, but Azure Web App + Cloudflare could have potentials.
No changes:
Automattic & DreamHost & Scaleway: They did not charge for traffic. Maybe Scaleway users could benefit from better routing provided by Argo?
Last time I checked on DO and Linode the majority of traffic destined to CloudFlare relied on transit providers, since neither of those providers carry traffic on their own backbones outside of the region your cloud server exists in.
This is a good move, however I am puzzled by some of the logic CloudFlare are using it. As they say thenselves, someone has to cover the costs of the infrastructure to move data from Ashburn to Sydney (example). Whether those packets start life over a PNI link, transit provider or on the original providers backbone, somebody somewhere is picking up the cost. (Not the customer anymore though, thanks to CloudFlare!)
Quoting from https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/26/cloudflare-partners-with-microsoft-google-and-others-to-reduce-bandwidth-costs/
Looks like they would be sharing user data for customer benefit
Since Argo is mentioned I suppose it's Cloudflare eating the cost.
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Talking about their bandwidth accounting systems. The header is for the DO/Linode/etc bandwidth monitoring systems to know that traffic from customer X is destined to cloudflare so don't bill customer for said traffic.
Nothing different from how Cloudflare currently works, they're eating those costs already.
The more peering available, the more they win out in the long term. If they're connected to every major cloud provider's edge they can basically scrub any outbound nastiness at the source and free up ports that would normally eat that traffic via transit providers.
Considering most of the Internet traffic are from bots, eliminating the cost of transit could have enough benefit to offset all the cost. Not to say Cloudflare will be able to stop the DDoS traffic from compromised servers directly even before the traffic reaches Cloudflare's POP...
The way I look at it is - they're offering this service already (and have for years) and it's going over more expensive transit, so no matter what they're cutting costs. The hosts who join up win because they save on their transit as well - so they just split the cost of a cross connect at each location.
CF won't be able to stop bad traffic before the PoP, but it's cheaper to sink multiple Gbps over a cheap cross-connect than it is to let that traffic hop through some other upstream in the same city or region.
It's against net neutrality to engage in settlement-free peering?
The stupid thing is there is no such thing in reality, local traffic via direct peering is usually cheaper than transit, sending a packet next door costs less than half way around the world.
It should only be a net neutrality issue if the providers refuse to do the same for others.
Actually the reason Cloudflare is able to provide the service for free is that Cloudflare already have direct peering with all the partners at the same pop. Most likely connected by one fiber in the same building - so they are not charging each other for the traffic.
While Cloudflare May have peering to IX that lower their cost, this is absolutely costing all parties involved something to support, however no one is doing it out of the goodness of their heart.
For Cloudflare it brings more users onboard, even on the free tier its easiest to move a customer from free to paid than conquest from another CDN.
For DO/Linode it means potentially more customers, if I want to have a service that distributes content, I can now do it with little fear of bandwidth costs at these vendors.
It’s more of a marketing and product differentiation push than anything revolutionary for sure.
Seems like Cloudflare wants to become the new systemd. First domains, now this. I'll keep my distance for now while using Gmail on my Android phone. God I'm so clever.