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Cloudflare's Disruption

Overview

Shownote

Highlights

Transcript

Chapters

Pins

Cloudflare's Disruption

Stratechery

2021/09/30
Stratechery

Stratechery

2021/09/30
OverviewShownoteHighlightsTranscriptChaptersPins

Shownote

Cloudflare's new storage offering is potentially disruptive both economically and strategically.

Highlights

This episode explores Cloudflare’s strategic move into cloud object storage with the launch of R2, analyzing how it challenges AWS S3’s dominance—not through feature parity, but via a fundamentally different economic and architectural model rooted in modularity and disruption theory.
00:08
R2 has no data egress fees
01:20
Cloudflare launched at TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 with a focus on enabling developers in a fragmented internet
01:54
Incumbents didn't respond to Cloudflare's offering for the long-tail of websites as it served a new market
02:42
New market disruptors compete with non-consumption by being more affordable and easier to use
03:25
New market disruptions start competing against non-consumption and later pull customers from the original to the new value network, starting with the least demanding tier
04:03
New market disruptions compete against non-consumption
04:17
AWS built compute capacity upfront and rented it on demand
06:37
AWS is profitable despite price cuts
08:48
S3 is Amazon's original web service launched on March 14, 2006
08:56
There's a notable cost difference between moving data in and out of AWS, referred to as 'AWS's Hotel California'
10:37
There's no innocent reason for AWS's egress pricing—it's designed to lock customers in
12:47
R2 eliminates egress fees and reduces latency via Cloudflare's global network
12:56
Cloudflare R2 eliminates egress fees by using its global network with low marginal bandwidth costs
15:05
Cloudflare, a minnow compared to AWS in revenue, aims to be the fourth major public cloud according to Prince.
15:24
R2 doesn't mean Cloudflare's other cloud ambitions must be the same as AWS
16:40
R2's rejection of data lock-in could create a new modular cloud service ecosystem competing with big players like Amazon

Chapters

Protocol
00:00
Cloudflare’s Evolution
01:20
Matthew Prince, Cloudflare CEO
01:43
The Innovator's Solution
02:40
The Innovator's Solution
03:25
The Innovator's Solution
04:03
The AWS Transformation
04:16
Stratechery
06:37
S3’s Egress Pricing
08:48
Amazon
08:56
Cloudflare Blog
10:37
R2’s Low-End Disruption
12:47
Cloudflare Blog
12:50
Modular Disruption
15:05
Protocol
15:20
The Innovator's Solution
16:40

Transcript

Matthew Prince: 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. The ser...