Cloudflare scraps egress fees

Says eliminating egress charges is a 'huge win' for open-access to data stored in the cloud

Cloudflare, the distributed cloud and DNS firm, has announced a new 'R2' storage service that - it says - avoids expensive outbound-data charges for customers.

Egress charges, which are paid for removing data from the cloud, are normally the largest ongoing cost associated with cloud storage.

"We're excited to announce Cloudflare R2 Storage! By giving developers the ability to store large amounts of unstructured data, we're expanding what's possible with Cloudflare while slashing the egress bandwidth fees associated with typical cloud storage services to zero," product manager Greg McKeon said in a blog post.

"Cloudflare R2 Storage includes full S3 API compatibility, working with existing tools and applications as built," he added.

The move to avoid egress fee for R2 Storage indicates Cloudflare's intent to take on dominant rival AWS' Simple Storage Service (S3), which charges a hefty fee when customers move data out of cloud storage to external services.

Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure also charge similar fees, which critics see as a tactic cloud firms use to lock customers in to their ecosystem.

If customers are not careful, egress charges can lead to shocking bills.

"Egress bandwidth is often the largest charge for developers utilising object storage, and is also the hardest charge to predict," McKeon said.

"Eliminating it is a huge win for open-access to data stored in the cloud."

Cloudflare plans to price R2 storage at $0.015 per GB of data stored per month. S3 pricing, in comparison, starts at $0.023 per GB for the first 50 TB per month.

Cloudflare aims to beat AWS' S3 object storage price by at least 10 per cent. It added that it wants to make R2 Storage 'the least expensive option for performant object storage'.

'R2 will replicate data across multiple regions and support jurisdictional restrictions, giving businesses the ability to control where their data is stored to meet their local and global needs.'

R2 is fully integrated with the Cloudflare Workers serverless environment.

Since launching the Workerless platform in 2017, Cloudflare has released several developer tools in an effort to expand its reach into the developer community.

Cloudflare released Workers Unbound last July, which developers can use to run workloads across the Cloudflare network and pay only for what they use. The company claims this is up to 75 per cent cheaper than using the big cloud providers' serverless platforms (such as AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions and Microsoft Azure Functions).