Prince was spot-on about the competitive response of incumbents to Cloudflare’s offering for the long-tail of websites: it never came, because Cloudflare was serving a new market. It’s designed for a certain type of users that are very different than the users that a larger company might be trying to attract. The big incumbents have an Innovator’s Dilemma trying to come down and deal with a company like ours, but we welcome the competition. I’m really a big fan of Clay Christensen, he was a business school professor of mine, and I like the idea of businesses that come in from below. There are companies that are doing things at the high end of the market, and they make very fat margins doing it. What’s to stop them from coming in and replicating your model? So from a competitive standpoint, obviously you’re intruding on some of the stuff that the bigger boys are doing, and they’ve been at this for a long time. What is worth referring to with this announcement, though, is this clip I posted of Prince’s initial launch of Cloudflare at TechCrunch Disrupt 2010, particularly this bit from the Q&A: I already wrote earlier this year about Cloudflare’s unique advantages in a world where the Internet is increasingly fragmented, thanks to the distributed nature of their service, and why that positioned the company to compete with the major cloud providers in the long run. It will be compatible with S3’s API, which makes it much easier to move applications already written with S3 in mind, and Cloudflare said that beyond the elimination of egress fees, the new service will be 10% cheaper to operate than S3.Ĭloudflare has always framed itself as a disruptor R2 lives up to its reputation.
R2 will run across Cloudflare’s global network, which is most known for providing anti-DDoS services to its customers by absorbing and dispersing the massive amounts of traffic that accompany denial-of-service attacks on websites. Cloudflare will not charge data-egress fees for customers using R2, taking direct aim at the fees AWS charges developers to move data out of its widely popular S3 storage service.
The service will be called R2 - “one less than S3,” quipped Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince in an interview with Protocol ahead of Cloudflare’s announcement Tuesday morning. Cloudflare is ready to launch a new cloud object storage service that promises to be cheaper than the established alternatives, a step the company believes will catapult it into direct competition with AWS and other cloud providers.
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