Tag Archives: Bandwidth Alliance

Introducing Cloudflare’s Technology Partner Program

Post Syndicated from Matt Lewis original https://blog.cloudflare.com/technology-partner-program/

Introducing Cloudflare’s Technology Partner Program

The Internet is built on a series of shared protocols, all working in harmony to deliver the collective experience that has changed the way we live and work. These open standards have created a platform such that a myriad of companies can build unique services and products that work together seamlessly. As a steward and supporter of an open Internet, we aspire to provide an interoperable platform that works with all the complementary technologies that our customers use across their technology stack. This has been the guiding principle for the multiple partnerships we have launched over the last few years.  

One example is our Bandwidth Alliance — launched in 2018, this alliance with 18 cloud and storage providers aims to reduce egress fees, also known as data transfer fees, for our customers. The Bandwidth Alliance has broken the norms of the cloud industry so that customers can move data more freely. Since then, we have launched several technology partner programs with over 40+ partners, including:

  • Analytics — Visualize Cloudflare logs and metrics easily, and help customers better understand events and trends from websites and applications on the Cloudflare network.
  • Network Interconnect — Partnerships with best-in-class Interconnection platforms offer private, secure, software-defined links with near instant-turn-up of ports.
  • Endpoint Protection Partnerships — With these integrations, every connection to our customer’s corporate application gets an additional layer of identity assurance without the need to connect to VPN.
  • Identity Providers — Easily integrate your organization’s single sign-on provider and benefit from the ease-of-use and functionality of Cloudflare Access.
Introducing Cloudflare’s Technology Partner Program

These partner programs have helped us serve our customers better alongside our partners with our complementary solutions. The integrations we have driven have made it easy for thousands of customers to use Cloudflare with other parts of their stack.

We aim to continue expanding the Cloudflare Partner Network to make it seamless for our customers to use Cloudflare. To support our growing ecosystem of partners, we are excited to launch our Technology Partner Program.

Announcing Cloudflare’s Technology Partner Program

Cloudflare’s Technology Partner Program facilitates innovative integrations that create value for our customers, our technology partners, and Cloudflare. Our partners not only benefit from technical integrations with us, but also have the opportunity to drive sales and marketing efforts to better serve mutual customers and prospects.

This program offers a guiding structure so that our partners can benefit across three key areas:

  • Build with Cloudflare: Sandbox access to Cloudflare enterprise features and APIs to build and test integrations. Opportunity to collaborate with Cloudflare’s product teams to build innovative solutions.
  • Market with Cloudflare: Develop joint solution brief and host joint events to drive awareness and adoption of integrations. Leverage a range of our partners tools and resources to bring our joint solutions to market.
  • Sell with Cloudflare: Align with our sales teams to jointly target relevant customer segments across geographies.

Technology Partner Tiers

Depending on the maturity of the integration and fit with Cloudflare’s product portfolio, we have two types of partners:

  • Strategic partners: Strategic partners have mature integrations across the Cloudflare product suite. They are leaders in their industries and have a significant overlap with our customer base. These partners are strategically aligned with our sales and marketing efforts, and they collaborate with our product teams to bring innovative solutions to market.
  • Integration partners: Integration partners are early participants in Cloudflare’s partnership ecosystem. They already have or are on a path to build validated, functional integrations with Cloudflare. These partners have programmatic access to resources that will help them experiment with and build integrations with Cloudflare.

Work with Us

If you are interested in working with our Technology Partnerships team to develop and bring to market a joint solution, we’d love to hear from you!  Partners can complete the application on our Technology Partner Program website and we will reach out quickly to discuss how we can help build solutions for our customers together.

AWS’s Egregious Egress

Post Syndicated from Matthew Prince original https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/

AWS’s Egregious Egress

AWS’s Egregious Egress

When web hosting services first emerged in the mid-1990s, you paid for everything on a separate meter: bandwidth, storage, CPU, and memory. Over time, customers grew to hate the nickel-and-dime nature of these fees. The market evolved to a fixed-fee model. Then came Amazon Web Services.

AWS was a huge step forward in terms of flexibility and scalability, but a massive step backward in terms of pricing. Nowhere is that more apparent than with their data transfer (bandwidth) pricing. If you look at the (ironically named) AWS Simple Monthly Calculator you can calculate the price they charge for bandwidth for their typical customer. The price varies by region, which shouldn’t surprise you because the cost of transit is dramatically different in different parts of the world.

Charging for Stocks, Paying for Flows

AWS charges customers based on the amount of data delivered — 1 terabyte (TB) per month, for example. To visualize that, imagine data is water. AWS fills a bucket full of water and then charges you based on how much water is in the bucket. This is known as charging based on “stocks.”

On the other hand, AWS pays for bandwidth based on the capacity of their network. The base unit of wholesale bandwidth is priced as one Megabit per second per month (1 Mbps). Typically, a provider like AWS, will pay for bandwidth on a monthly fee based on the number of Mbps that their network uses at its peak capacity. So, extending the analogy, AWS doesn’t pay for the amount of water that ends up in their customers’ buckets, but rather the capacity based on the diameter of the “hose” that is used to fill them. This is known as paying for “flows.”

Translating Flows to Stocks

You can translate between flow and stock pricing by knowing that a 1 Mbps connection (think of it as the "hose") can transfer 0.3285 TB (328GB) if utilized to its fullest capacity over the course of a month (think of it as running the "hose" at full capacity to fill the "bucket" for a month).1 AWS obviously has more than 1 Mbps of capacity — they can certainly transfer more than 0.3285 TB per month — but you can use this as the base unit of their bandwidth costs, and compare it against what they charge a customer to deliver 1 Terabyte (1TB), in order to figure out the AWS bandwidth markup.

One more subtlety to be as accurate as possible. Wholesale bandwidth is also billed at the 95th percentile. That effectively cuts off the peak hour or so of use every day. That means a 1 Mbps connection running at 100% can actually likely transfer closer to 0.3458 TB (346GB) per month.

Two more factors are important: utilization and regional costs. AWS can’t run all their connections at 100% utilization 24×7 for a month. Instead, they’ll have some average utilization per transit connection in any month. It’s reasonable to estimate that they likely run at between 20% and 40% average utilization. That would be a typical average utilization range for the industry. The higher their utilization, the more efficient they are, the lower their costs, and the higher their effective customer markup will be.

To be conservative, we’ve assumed that AWS’s average utilization is the bottom of that range (20%), but you can download the raw data and adjust the assumptions however you think makes sense.

We have a good sense of the wholesale prices of bandwidth in different regions around the world based on what Cloudflare sees in the market when we buy bandwidth ourselves. We’d imagine AWS gets at least as good of pricing as we do. We’ve included a rough estimate of these prices in the calculation, rounding up on the wholesale price wherever there was a question (which makes AWS look better).

Massive Markups

Based on these assumptions, here’s our best estimate of AWS’s effective markup for egress bandwidth on a per-region basis.

AWS’s Egregious Egress
AWS’s Egregious Egress

Don’t rest easy, South Korea with your merely 357% markup. The general rule of thumb appears to be that the older a market is, the more Amazon wrings from its customers in egregious egress markups — and the Seoul availability zone is only a bit over four years old. Winter, unfortunately, inevitably seems to come to AWS customers.

AWS Stands Alone In Not Passing On Savings to Customers

Remember, this is for the transit bandwidth that AWS is paying for. For the bandwidth that they exchange with a network like Cloudflare, where they are directly connected (settlement-free peered) over a private network interface (PNI), there are no meaningful incremental costs and their effective margins are nearly infinite. Add in the effect of rebates Amazon collects from colocation providers who charge cross connect fees to customers, and the effective markup is likely even higher.

Some other cloud providers take into account that their costs are lower when passing over peering connections. Both Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud will substantially discount egress charges for their mutual Cloudflare customers. Members of the Bandwidth Alliance — Alibaba, Automattic, Backblaze, Cherry Servers, Dataspace, DNS Networks, DreamHost, HEFICED, Kingsoft Cloud, Liquid Web, Scalway, Tencent, Vapor, Vultr, Wasabi, and Zenlayer — waive bandwidth charges for mutual Cloudflare customers.

AWS’s Egregious Egress

At this point, the majority of hosting providers in the industry either substantially discount or entirely waive egress fees when sending traffic from their network to a peer like Cloudflare. AWS is the notable exception in the industry. It’s worth noting that we invited AWS to be a part of the Bandwidth Alliance, and they politely declined.

It seems like a no-brainer that if we’re not paying for the bandwidth costs, and the hosting provider isn’t paying for the bandwidth costs, customers shouldn’t be charged for the bandwidth costs at the same rate as if the traffic was being sent over the public Internet. Unfortunately, Amazon’s supposed obsession over doing the right thing for customers doesn’t extend to egress charges.

Artificially Held High

Amazon’s mission statement is: “We strive to offer our customers the lowest possible prices, the best available selection, and the utmost convenience.” And yet, when it comes to egress, their prices are far from the lowest possible.

During the last ten years, industry wholesale transit prices have fallen an average of 23% annually. Compounded over that time, wholesale bandwidth is 93% less expensive than 10 years ago. However, AWS’s egress fees over that same period have fallen by only 25%.

And, since 2018, the egress fees AWS charges in North America and Europe have not dropped a penny even as wholesale prices in those markets over the same time period have fallen by more than half.

AWS’s Hotel California Pricing

Another oddity of AWS’s pricing is that they charge for data transferred out of their network but not for data transferred into their network. If the only time you’ve paid for bandwidth is with your residential Internet connection, then this may make some sense. Because of some technical limitations of the cable network, download bandwidth is typically higher than upload bandwidth on cable modem connections. But that’s not how wholesale bandwidth is bought or sold.

AWS’s Egregious Egress

Wholesale bandwidth isn’t like your home cable connection. Instead, it’s symmetrical. That means that if you purchase a 1 Mbps (1 Megabit per second) connection, then you have the capacity to send 1 Megabit out and receive another 1 Megabit in every second. If you receive 1 Mbps in and simultaneously 1 Mbps out, you pay the same price as if you receive 1 Mbps in and 0 Mbps out or 0 Mbps in and 1 Mbps out. In other words, ingress (data sent to AWS) doesn’t cost them any more or less than egress (data sent from AWS). And yet, they charge customers more to take data out than put it in. It’s a head scratcher.

We’ve tried to be charitable in trying to understand why AWS would charge this way. Disappointingly, there just doesn’t seem to be an innocent explanation. As we dug in, even things like writes versus reads and the wear they put on storage media, as well as the challenges of capacity planning for storage capacity, suggest that AWS should charge less for egress than ingress.

But they don’t.

The only rationale we can reasonably come up with for AWS’s egress pricing: locking customers into their cloud, and making it prohibitively expensive to get customer data back out. So much for being customer-first.

But… But… But…

AWS may object that this doesn’t take into account the cost of things like metro dark fiber between data centers, amortized optical and other networking equipment, and cross connects. In our experience, those costs amount to a rounding error of less than one cent per Mbps when operating at AWS-like scale. And these prices have been falling at a similar rate to the decline in the price of bandwidth over the past 10 years. Yet AWS’s egress prices have barely budged.

All the data above is derived from what’s published on AWS’s simple pricing calculator. There’s no doubt that some large customers are able to negotiate lower prices. But these are the prices charged to small businesses and startups by default. And, when we’ve reviewed pricing even with large AWS customers, the egress fees remain egregious.

It’s Not Too Late!

We have a lot of mutual customers who use Cloudflare and AWS. They’re a great service, and we want to support our mutual customers and provide services in a way that meets their needs and is always as secure, fast, reliable, and efficient as possible. We remain hopeful that AWS will do the right thing, lower their egress fees, join the Bandwidth Alliance — following the lead of the majority of the rest of the hosting industry — and pass along savings from peering with Cloudflare and other networks to all their customers.

AWS’s Egregious Egress

…….
1Here’s the calculation to convert a 1 Mbps flow into TB stocks: 1 Mbps @ 100% for 1 month = (1 million bits per second) * (60 seconds / minute) * (60 minutes / hour) * (730 hours on average/month) divided by (eight bits / byte) divided by 10^12 (to convert bytes to Terabytes) = 0.3285 TB/month.

Empowering customers with the Bandwidth Alliance

Post Syndicated from Arjunan Rajeswaran original https://blog.cloudflare.com/empowering-customers-with-the-bandwidth-alliance/

Empowering customers with the Bandwidth Alliance

High Egress Fees

Empowering customers with the Bandwidth Alliance

Debates over the benefits and drawbacks of walled gardens versus open ecosystems have carried on since the beginnings of the tech industry. As applied to the Internet, we don’t think there’s much to debate. There’s a reason why it’s easier today than ever before to start a company online: open standards. They’ve encouraged a flourishing of technical innovation, made the Internet faster and safer, and easier and less expensive for anyone to have an Internet presence.

Of course, not everyone likes competition. Breaking open standards — with proprietary ones — is a common way to stop competition. In the cloud industry, a more subtle way to gain power over customers and lock them in has emerged. Something that isn’t obvious at the start: high egress fees.

You probably won’t notice them when you embark on your cloud journey. And if you need to bring data into your environment, there’s no data charge. But say you want to get that data out? Or go multi-cloud, and work with another cloud provider who is best-in-class? That’s when the charges start rolling in.

To make matters worse, as the number and diversity of applications in your IT stack increases, the lock-in power of egress fees increases as well. As more data needs to travel between more applications across clouds and there is more data to move to a newer, better cloud service, the egress tax increases, further locking you in. You lose the ability to choose best-of-breed services or to negotiate prices with your provider.

Why We Launched The Bandwidth Alliance

This is not a better Internet. So wherever we can, we’re on the lookout for ways to prevent this from happening — in this case, with our Bandwidth Alliance partners. We launched the Bandwidth Alliance in late 2018 with over fifteen cloud providers who also believe in an open Internet where data can flow freely. In short, partners in the Bandwidth Alliance have agreed to reduce egress fees for data transfer — either in their entirety or at a steep discount.

Empowering customers with the Bandwidth Alliance

How did we do this — the power of Cloudflare’s network

Say you’re hosted in a facility in Ashburn, Virginia and a user visits your service from Sydney, Australia. There is a cost to moving the data between the two places. In this example, a cloud provider would use their own global backbone to carry the traffic across the United States and then across the Pacific, eventually handing it off to the users’ ISP. Someone has to maintain the infrastructure that hauls that traffic more than 9,000 miles from Ashburn to Sydney.

Cloudflare has more than 206 data centers globally in almost every major city. Our network automatically receives traffic at whatever data center is nearest to the user and then carries it to the data center closest to where the origin is hosted.

As part of the Bandwidth Alliance, this traffic is then delivered to the partner data center via private network interconnects (PNI) or peered connections. These PNIs typically occur within the same facility through a fiber optic cable between routers, or via a dedicated connection between two facilities at a very low cost. Unlike when there’s a transit provider in between, there’s no middleman, so neither Cloudflare nor our partners bear incremental costs for transferring the data over this PNI.

Cloudflare is one of the most interconnected networks in the world, peering with over 9,500 networks globally, including major ISPs, cloud providers, and enterprises. Cloudflare is connected with partners in many global regions via Private Interconnections, Internet exchanges with private peering, and via public peering.

Empowering customers with the Bandwidth Alliance

Customer benefit

Since its inception, the Bandwidth Alliance program has provided many customers significant benefits: both in egress cost savings and more importantly, in choice across their needs of compute, storage, and other services. Providing this choice and preventing vendor lock-in has allowed our customers to choose the right product for their use case while benefiting from significant savings.

We looked at a sample set of our customers benefiting from the Bandwidth Alliance and estimated their egress savings based on the amount of data (GB) flowing from the origin to us. We estimated the potential savings using the \$0.08/GB retail price vs. the discounted \$0.04/GB for large amounts of data transferred. Of course, customers could save more by using one of our partners with whom the cost is $0/GB. We compared the savings to the amount of money these customers spend on us. These savings are in the range of 7.5% to 27% or, in other words, for every \$1 spent on Cloudflare customers are saving up to \$0.27 — that is a no-brainer offer to take advantage of.

The Bandwidth Alliance also offers customers the option to choose a cloud that meets their price and feature requirements. For a media delivery use case, choosing the best storage provider and Cloudflare has allowed one customer to save up to 85% in storage costs. Another customer who went with a best-of-breed solution across storage and the Cloudflare global network reduced their overall cloud bill by 50%. Customers appreciate these benefits of choice:

“We were looking at moving our data from one storage provider to another, and it was a total no-brainer to use a service that was part of the Bandwidth Alliance. It really makes sense for anyone looking at any cloud service, especially one that’s pushing a lot of traffic.” — James Ross, Co-founder/CTO, Nodecraft

Earlier this month we made it even easier for our joint customers with Microsoft Azure to realize the benefits of discounted egress to Cloudflare with Microsoft Azure’s Data Transfer Routing Preference. With a few clicks on the Azure dashboard, Cloudflare customer egress bills will automatically be discounted. It’s been exciting to hear positive customer feedback:

“Before taking advantage of the Routing Preference by Azure via Cloudflare, Egress fees were one of the key reasons that restricted us from having more multi-cloud solutions since it can be high and unpredictable at times as the traffic scales. Enabling Routing Preference on the Azure dashboard was quick and easy. It was a one-and-done effort, and we get discounted Egress rates on every Azure bill.”  — Darin MacRae, Chief Architect / Cloud Computing, MyRadar.com

If you’re looking to find the right set of cloud storage, networking and security solutions to meet your needs, consider the Bandwidth Alliance as an alternative to being locked-in to a single platform. We hope it helps.