Cloudflare Partners With Microsoft, Google and Others To Reduce Bandwidth Costs (techcrunch.com)

A group called the Bandwidth Alliance, being led by Cloudflare, promises to reduce the price of bandwidth for many cloud customers. "The overall idea here is that customers who use both Cloudflare, which is turning eight years old this week, and a cloud provider that's part of this alliance will get a significant discount on their egress traffic or won't have to pay for it at all," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The alliance is open, and others may join still, but right now it includes virtually every major and minor cloud provider you've ever heard of -- with one exception. Current members include Automattic, Backblaze, Digital Ocean, DreamHost, IBM Cloud, Linode, Google, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Packet, Scaleway and Vapor. Some of these will now offer free egress traffic to mutual customers with Cloudflare, while others will offer at least a 75 percent discount.

Why would these businesses choose to do away with what's a minor but high-margin business, though? "The argument that we made to them was a pretty simple argument: it makes sense for you to charge for transit when you are actually paying for it," [Cloudflare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince] said. Most of the time, though, those costs are very minor and Cloudflare, thanks to his massive number of global peering locations, can ingest the traffic directly from the cloud provider with no middlemen involved.

Comments

Other side of the coin

[Sarten-X]

Or in other words, if you're using Cloudflare, but want to host on Sarten-X's Super-Awesome Web Service (or any of the tons of cheap host providers out there) instead of Azure, you'll have to pay more for bandwidth, and if you're trying to pitch a startup service like an API to clients, they'll want to have that free-bandwidth perk that your competitors offer.

I guess now to be competitive as a cloud provider, I have to go join this "Alliance", which I'm sure will involve a contract of some kind, and some terms... if they'll even talk to a bit player like me.

Thanks, FCC, for killing Net Neutrality! This is exactly the kind of shit that was predicted, and you said it wouldn't happen.

Alliance my butt

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

More like a cartel to me.

Thanks FCC...