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?
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.
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!
[+] [-] partiallypro|7 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] khc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hesdeadjim|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrep|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ttul|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] godzillabrennus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgrahamc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] notriddle|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manigandham|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] devwastaken|7 years ago|reply
Id be happy if cloud providers reduced bandwidth costs for cached assets even.
[+] [-] Operyl|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cwt137|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loosescrews|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] eastdakota|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alaties|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] chocolatkey|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elithrar|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jgrahamc|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] atYevP|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zackbloom|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pickleman|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tempuser24|7 years ago|reply
https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-cloudflare/