
Cloudflare partners with Microsoft, Google and others to reduce bandwidth costs - jgrahamc
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/26/cloudflare-partners-with-microsoft-google-and-others-to-reduce-bandwidth-costs
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partiallypro
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?

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

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partiallypro
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.

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khc
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

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partiallypro
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/](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."

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

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

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mrep
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.

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jgrahamc
Blog has more details: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-
alliance/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/)

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notriddle
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?

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manigandham
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.

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devwastaken
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.

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Operyl
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.

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cwt137
I'm not a network guy, but can someone explain how this is more significant
than a multi-lateral peering agreement?

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loosescrews
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.

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chocolatkey
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?

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elithrar
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.

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r1ch
Cloudflare offers unmetered bandwidth, so this should remove any bandwidth
costs completely.

[https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-
us/articles/200172656-D...](https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-
us/articles/200172656-Does-Cloudflare-have-bandwidth-limits-or-charge-for-
bandwidth-)

~~~
huangbong
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.

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patrickg_zill
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?

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zackbloom
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.

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ucaetano
> they are actually paying $0

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

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

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sitepodmatt
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

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patrickg_zill
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.

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sitepodmatt
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)

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pickleman
There goes any level of free speech...

~~~
tempuser24
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/](https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-cloudflare/)

