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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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 24x7 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).

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

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.

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, Scaleway, Tencent, Vapor, Vultr, Wasabi, and Zenlayer — waive bandwidth charges for mutual Cloudflare customers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

.......

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In addition to our physical locations, our customers can now interconnect with us at any of 23 metro areas across five continents using software-defined layer 2 networking technology. Following the recent release of CNI (which includes PNI support for Magic Transit), customers can now order layer 3 DDoS protection in any of the markets below, without requiring physical cross connects, providing private and secure links, with simpler setup.

We’re very excited to announce that five of the world's premier interconnect platforms are available at launch. Console Connect by PCCW Global in 14 locations, Megaport in 14 locations, PacketFabric in 15 locations, Equinix ECX Fabric™ in 8 locations and Zayo Tranzact in 3 locations, spanning North America, Europe, Asia, Oceania and Africa.

What is an Interconnection Platform?

Like much of the networking world, there are many terms in the interconnection space for the same thing: Cloud Exchange, Virtual Cross Connect Platform and Interconnection Platform are all synonyms. They are platforms that allow two networks to interconnect privately at layer 2, without requiring additional physical cabling. Instead the customer can order a port and a virtual connection on a dashboard, and the interconnection ‘fabric’ will establish the connection. Since many large customers are already connected to these fabrics for their connections to traditional Cloud providers, it is a very convenient method to establish private connectivity with Cloudflare.

Cloudflare has an extensive peering infrastructure and already has private links to thousands of other networks. Virtual private interconnection is particularly attractive to customers with strict security postures and demanding performance requirements, but without the added burden of ordering and managing additional physical cross connects and expanding their physical infrastructure.

SecureSimilar to physical PNI, traffic does not pass across the Internet. Rather, it flows from the customer router, to the Interconnection Platform’s network and ultimately to Cloudflare. So while there is still some element of shared infrastructure, it’s not over the public Internet.

EfficientModern PNIs are typically a minimum of 1Gbps, but if you have the security motivation without the sustained 1Gbps data transfer rates, then you will have idle capacity. Virtual connections provide for “sub-rate” speeds, which means less than 1Gbps, such as 100Mbps, meaning you only pay for what you use. Most providers also allow some level of “burstiness”, which is to say you can exceed that 100Mbps limit for short periods.

PerformanceBy avoiding the public Internet, virtual links avoid Internet congestion.

PriceThe major cloud providers typically have different pricing for egressing data to the Internet compared to an Interconnect Platform. By connecting to your cloud via an Interconnect Partner, you can benefit from those reduced egress fees between your cloud and the Interconnection Platform. This builds on our Bandwidth Alliance to give customers more options to continue to drive down their network costs.

Less OverheadBy virtualizing, you reduce physical cable management to just one connection into the Interconnection Platform. From there, everything defined and managed in software. For example, ordering a 100Mbps link to Cloudflare can be a few clicks in a Dashboard, as would be a 100Mbps link into Salesforce.

Data Center IndependenceIs your infrastructure in the same metro, but in a different facility to Cloudflare? An Interconnection Platform can bring us together without the need for additional physical links.

1. In any of our physical facilities

2. In any of the 23 metro areas where we are currently connected to an Interconnection Platform (see below)

3. If you’d like to connect virtually in a location not yet listed below, simply get in touch via our interconnection page and we’ll work out the best way to connect.

The metro areas below have currently active connections. New providers and locations can be turned up on request.

Our customers have been asking for direct on-ramps to our global network for a long time and we’re excited to deliver that today with both physical and virtual connectivity of the world’s leading interconnection Platforms.

Already a Cloudflare customer and connected with one of our Interconnection partners? Then contact your account team today to get connected and benefit from improved reliability, security and privacy of Cloudflare Network Interconnect via our interconnection partners.

Are you an Interconnection Platform with customers demanding direct connectivity to Cloudflare? Head to our partner program page and click “Become a partner”. We’ll continue to add platforms and partners according to customer demand.

"Equinix and Cloudflare share the vision of software-defined, virtualized and API-driven network connections. The availability of Cloudflare on the Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric demonstrates that shared vision and we’re excited to offer it to our joint customers today."– Joseph Harding, Equinix, Vice President, Global Product & Platform MarketingSoftware Developer

"Cloudflare and Megaport are driven to offer greater flexibility to our customers. In addition to accessing Cloudflare’s platform on Megaport’s global internet exchange service, customers can now provision on-demand, secure connections through our Software Defined Network directly to Cloudflare Network Interconnect on-ramps globally. With over 700 enabled data centres in 23 countries, Megaport extends the reach of CNI onramps to the locations where enterprises house their critical IT infrastructure. Because Cloudflare is interconnected with our SDN, customers can point, click, and connect in real time. We’re delighted to grow our partnership with Cloudflare and bring CNI to our services ecosystem — allowing customers to build multi-service, securely-connected IT architectures in a matter of minutes."– Matt Simpson, Megaport, VP of Cloud Services

“The ability to self-provision direct connections to Cloudflare’s network from Console Connect is a powerful tool for enterprises as they come to terms with new demands on their networks. We are really excited to bring together Cloudflare’s industry-leading solutions with PCCW Global’s high-performance network on the Console Connect platform, which will deliver much higher levels of network security and performance to businesses worldwide.”– Michael Glynn, PCCW Global, VP of Digital Automated Innovation

"Our customers can now connect to Cloudflare via a private, secure, and dedicated connection via the PacketFabric Marketplace. PacketFabric is proud to be the launch partner for Cloudflare's Interconnection program. Our large U.S. footprint provides the reach and density that Cloudflare customers need."– Dave Ward, PacketFabric CEO

First let’s dive into the history of the S3 API and why it’s important for Cloudflare users.

Prior to 2006, before the mass migration to the Cloud, if you wanted to store content for your company you needed to build your own expensive and highly available storage platform that was large enough to store all your existing content with enough growth headroom for your business. AWS launched to help eliminate this model by renting their physical computing and storage infrastructure.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) led the market by offering a scalable and resilient tool for storing unlimited amounts of data without building it yourself. It could be integrated into any application but there was one catch: you couldn’t use any existing standard such as WebDAV, FTP or SMB: your application needed to interface with Amazon’s bespoke S3 API.

Fast forward to 2020 and the storage provider landscape has become highly competitive with many providers capable of providing petabyte (and exabyte) scale content storage at extremely low cost-per-gigabyte. However, Amazon S3 has remained a dominant player despite heavy competition and not being the most cost-effective player.

The broad adoption of the S3 API by developers in their codebases and internal systems has transformed the S3 API into what WebDAV promised us to be: de facto standard HTTP File Storage API.

With many code bases and legacy applications being entrenched in the S3 API, the process to switch to a more cost-effective storage provider is not so easy. Companies need to consider the cost of engineer time programming a new storage API while also physically moving their data.

This engineering overhead has led many storage providers to natively support the S3 API, leveling the playing field and allowing companies to focus on picking the most cost-effective provider.

Cloudflare caches content in Points of Presence located in more than 200 cities around the world. This cached content is then handed to your Internet service provider (ISP) over low cost and often free Internet exchange connections in the same facility using mutual fibre optic cables. This cost saving is fairly well understood as the benefit of content delivery networks and has become highly commoditized.

What is less well understood is the first-mile cost of moving data from a storage provider to the content delivery network. Typically storage providers expect traffic to route via the Internet and will charge the consumer per-gigabyte of data transmitted. This is not the case for Cloudflare as we also share facilities and mutual fibre optic cables with many storage providers.

These shared interconnects created an opportunity to waive the cost of first-mile bandwidth between Cloudflare and many providers and is what prompted us to create the Bandwidth Alliance.

Media and entertainment companies serving user-generated content have a continuous supply of new content being moved over the first-mile from the storage provider to the content delivery network. The first-mile bandwidth cost adds up and using a Bandwidth Alliance partner such Backblaze can entirely eliminate it.

The Solutions Engineering team at Cloudflare is tasked with providing strategic technical guidance for our enterprise customers.

It’s not uncommon for developers to connect Cloudflare’s global network directly to their storage provider and directly serve content such as live and on-demand video without an intermediate web server.

For security purposes engineers typically use Cloudflare Workers to sign each uncached request using the S3 API. Cloudflare Workers allows anyone to deploy code to our global network of over 200+ Points of Presence in seconds and is built on top of Service Workers.

We’ve tested Backblaze B2’s S3 Compatible API in Cloudflare Workers using the same code tested for Amazon S3 buckets and it works perfectly by changing the target endpoint.

Here’s how it is done using Cloudflare Worker’s CLI tool Wrangler:

Generate a new project in Wrangler using a template intended for use with Amazon S3:

wrangler generate <projectname> https://github.com/obezuk/worker-signed-s3-template

This template uses aws4fetch. A fast, lightweight implementation of an S3 Compatible signing library that is commonly used in Service Worker environments like Cloudflare Workers.

The template creates an index.js file with a standard request signing implementation:

import { AwsClient } from 'aws4fetch'

const aws = new AwsClient({
    "accessKeyId": AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID,
    "secretAccessKey": AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY,
    "region": AWS_DEFAULT_REGION
});

addEventListener('fetch', function(event) {
    event.respondWith(handleRequest(event.request))
});

async function handleRequest(request) {
    var url = new URL(request.url);
    url.hostname = AWS_S3_BUCKET;
    var signedRequest = await aws.sign(url);
    return await fetch(signedRequest, { "cf": { "cacheEverything": true } });
}

Modify your wrangler.toml file to use your Backblaze B2 API Key ID and Secret:

[env.dev]
vars = { AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID = "<BACKBLAZE B2 keyId>", 
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY = "<BACKBLAZE B2 secret>", 
AWS_DEFAULT_REGION = "", 
AWS_S3_BUCKET = "<BACKBLAZE B2 bucketName>.<BACKBLAZE B2 S3 Endpoint>"}

AWS_S3_BUCKET environment variable will be the combination of your bucket name, period and S3 Endpoint. For a Backblaze B2 Bucket named example-bucket and S3 Endpoint s3.us-west-002.backblazeb2.com use example-bucket.s3.us-west-002.backblazeb2.com

AWS_DEFAULT_REGION environment variable is interpreted from your S3 Endpoint. I use us-west-002.

We recommend using Secret Environment variables to store your AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY content when using this script in production.

Next run wrangler preview --env dev to enter a preview window of your Worker script. My bucket contained a static website containing adaptive streaming video content stored in a Backblaze B2 bucket.

Note: We permit caching of third party video content only for enterprise domains. Free/Pro/Biz users wanting to serve video content via Cloudflare may use Stream which delivers an end-to-end video delivery service.

Backblaze B2’s compatibility for the S3 API is an exciting update that has made their storage platform highly compatible with existing code bases and legacy systems. And, as a special offer to Cloudflare blog readers, Backblaze will pay the migration costs for transferring your data from S3 to Backblaze B2 (click here for more detail). With the cost of migration covered and compatibility for your existing workflows, it is now easier than ever to switch to a Bandwidth Alliance partner and save on first-mile costs. By doing so, you can slash your cloud bills, gain flexibility, and make no compromises to your performance.

To learn more, join us on May 14th for a webinar focused on getting you ultra fast worldwide content delivery.

In addition, we are working with our existing partners including Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean and several others to onboard customers and provide them the benefits of the Bandwidth Alliance. Contact us at cloudflare-bandwidth-alliance@cloudflare.com if you are interested.

Over the past year we have seen several customers take advantage of the Bandwidth Alliance and wanted to highlight two examples.

Nodecraft, which allows users an easy way to set up their own game servers, is a perfect example of how the Bandwidth Alliance helped to cut down egress costs. Nodecraft supports games like Minecraft, ARK: Survival Evolved, and Counter-Strike. As Nodecraft’s popularity increased, so did their AWS bill. They were not only being charged for storage they were using, but also for ‘egress’ or data transfer fees out of AWS. They made the decision to move their storage to Backblaze. Now they use Backblaze’s B2 Storage and Cloudflare’s extensive network to deliver content to customers without any egress charges. Read more about their journey here and here.

Pippa.io provides simple and smart solutions for podcasting, including hosting, analytics, and ads. The most important of Pippa’s business is rapid and reliable asset delivery. As Pippa grew, they were pushing millions of large audio files to listeners worldwide. This resulted in significantly increased costs, including excessive data egress fees for retrieving data from a cloud storage service such as AWS S3. DigitalOcean waives egress fees to transfer data to Cloudflare, effectively creating a zero-cost data bridge from DigitalOcean to Cloudflare’s global network. Pippa moved to DigitalOcean storage and Cloudflare’s global cloud security and delivery network. With the combination of lower cost storage and zero egress fees, Pippa saw a 50% savings on their cloud bill.

Nodecraft and Pippa are just two examples of small businesses who are seeing significant cost savings from the Bandwidth Alliance. They both chose the best storage and cloud solution for their use case and a global cloud network by Cloudflare without any taxation of transferring data between these two products. With our newly added partners we expect many more customers to benefit.

You may be asking - ‘How much can I save?’ To help you get a sense of the scale of your potential savings, by moving to the Bandwidth Alliance, we have put together a calculator. Fill in your details on egress to figure out how much you could be saving. We hope this is a helpful resource as you evaluate your cloud platform choices and spend.

We are tremendously excited about the value our Bandwidth Alliance partner ecosystem adds to our customers. We’re on a mission to help make the internet a better place; and ensuring everyone can access cloud resources at zero-egress rates supports that mission in many ways. It’s an easy way for our clients to build modern, cloud-centric applications without the design constraint and financial burden of egress fees.

The cloudflare bandwidth alliance partner landscape continues to grow, and incorporate a diverse group of partners, with today’s second wave announcement.  With over a dozen different partners, the range of choices can quickly become overwhelming. And, while these are all high-quality platforms which we are happy to recommend to our clients - their important differences will help determine the best fit for you, the customer.

In this post, I’ll lay out some of Cloudflare’s approach to this solution design question through the lens of a large client we recently worked with. We apply this approach across our full range of products and services, including many use cases far different from the Storage need we’ll dig into in this post. I hope that this can help all of our clients, or anyone else interested, mirror a similar approach.

The first step to solution design, whether on a technical issue or a business process, is a clear understanding of the needs. In this case, we identified a few key needs from our new client:

• Zero-egress storage option: required to manage costs

• Costs: low cost storage given likelihood of high volume growth

• Read requests: ability to support thousands of read requests per second

• Write requests: less concern about rate of write requests

• Volume: fairly high volume of storage; 500 TB +

• Size: 10’s of millions of small objects in storage

• API: compatible with the familiar S3 API

• Security: authentication between the storage and Cloudflare

These needs were specific to this large client but the factors of consideration are likely similar for any customer looking to store data on a host and deliver it through Cloudflare. The relative weight to each of these factors will depend on your particular application.

With the client’s needs in mind, we were able to start filtering out some providers which did not align well to these needs. I generally find it useful to sort the options into three buckets:

1. Checks all the boxes

2. Soft no (fails to check a few boxes, but we may be able to find a middle ground)

3. Hard no (fails crucial boxes)

First, several providers use a custom API instead of S3. This can have many advantages including cost and performance in some cases; but was not aligned with this client’s request given their development plans. We put all of those into ‘Soft No’ right away.

Then, we dug into each provider’s performance and economic model around read vs write requests; storage volume; and read object size. A few had economics or rate limits which were very challenging for the client’s use case, which put them into ‘Hard No’ category. For example; some providers charge a fee based on the number of Reads from storage. This client wanted to perform 10’s of millions of reads per day on average, across their many stored objects, so any pricing based on this would quickly break their economics. For other use cases, when a low number of large objects are stored, this would not be as much of a factor.

At this point, we had identified a partner which was a very good fit for our client. We introduced the teams, and began implementation. This customer is currently ramping up storage and delivery of their content based on this joint solution and we expect to be serving 100TB’s of their stored data over the next year or so.

In any technology implementation; and especially a complex engagement in Cloudflare’s ever-expanding ecosystem, it is important for us to keep the customer’s goals and use case first in mind. By building close partnerships with our clients, we are able to arrive at a clear understanding of these needs and design the best solution.

We’re excited to work with clients of any scale on Storage, Edge Compute, Security, and many technologies; and leverage our ever growing network to help them succeed.

At Cloudflare, our mission is to help build a better Internet. That means making the Internet faster, smarter, safer, but also more cost efficient with the help of our partners. We are always on the lookout for ways to help save customers money. With that goal we announced the Bandwidth Alliance with our founding partners during our Birthday week.

The key concept of the Bandwidth Alliance is to help reduce and in many cases waive data transfer charges, sometimes known as "bandwidth” or “egress” charges, for our mutual customers. We achieve this in partnership with the founding partners through strongly interconnected networks over peered connections. These connections typically occur within the same facility with no middleman. So, neither Cloudflare nor the cloud provider bears incremental costs. Further, we will also use our smart routing system (read details in this technical blog post) to ensure that all our customers’ traffic on participating cloud providers, once their systems are set up, qualify for this offer.

We are proud to announce the following cloud providers and hosting companies have joined the Bandwidth Alliance in committing to zero data transfer fees for mutual customers.  Below is the list of companies from whom you’ll be able to get zero data transfer fees as a Cloudflare customer. If you're hosted with any member of the Bandwidth Alliance, your data transfer fees should decrease as soon as the required technical and accounting systems are activated. Click on each partner to learn more.

We are especially excited to note the global nature of these partners, expands the Alliance and allows customers in many parts of the world to take advantage of the Alliance. The requests to join the Alliance have been significant and we are working to onboard further partners from both a technical and business perspective.  

This is an open alliance of like-minded companies and if you are a cloud provider or networking company and aren't listed, we encourage you to email cloudflare-bandwidth-alliance@cloudflare.com with a request for inclusion.

The Bandwidth Alliance is providing this benefit to all Cloudflare customers at no additional cost. Our partners provide an a wide variety of choices of cloud services and products.

We are working with our founding partners to make it even easier to use our services jointly. We are helping an initial set of customers use cloud storage with their Cloudflare service and zero data transfer fees. These customers were looking for a best of breed solution with specific storage and delivery needs. Please read this technical architecture post by Kirk Schwenkler describing the considerations in enabling such a solution.

This is a starting point and we expect to be developing many reference architectures with our partners to allow our customers to have a truly best of breed option without any concerns on transfer fees.

Here is what the joining members say:

“Open, affordable and free internet is what we strive for and what we give to our clients. Everyone and every company should have access to it. We are thrilled that the values shared by the Bandwidth Alliance can also be our values.”

Marcin Kowalski, Senior Product Manager at Data Space

"DNSnetworks is proud to become a partner in Cloudflare’s initiative for a global bandwidth alliance.  Reducing the cost of bandwidth for partners and not-for-profit businesses fits into our mission of giving back to the community that has provided us with their business and trust."

Kevin Conroy, VP Cloud Operations at DNSnetworks

“At Host1Plus we believe in long-term connections. Therefore, we simplify and personalize the customer experience for our clients to entrust their infrastructure to us. By joining this alliance, we empower our customers to scale their businesses easily across the globe. We look forward to working together with the Bandwidth Alliance and offer the fastest connections to Host1Plus and Cloudflare customers”

Vincentas Grinius, CEO & Founder at Host1Plus

"At Vultr, we strive to provide the most predictable cloud platform to all of our customers. Joining the Bandwidth Alliance, in partnership with Cloudflare, furthers our vision by being able to provide zero egress to our mutual customers."

David Aninowsky, Founder/CEO at Vultr

"In March of 2018, Wasabi pioneered the cloud storage industry’s first ‘unlimited free egress’ pricing plan. We are excited to join forces with Cloudflare and the Bandwidth Alliance, validating that the early business models of Cloud 1.0 vendors no longer applies in a world that expects unlimited everything. This partnership is another way of slingshotting our mutual customers into a future that is already here today."

David Friend, CEO and co-founder at Wasabi

As an organization, we could choose to celebrate Cloudflare’s birthday in lots of different ways (a press release, a company party, or fun gifts for all our employees). But at Cloudflare, we have a unique birthday tradition: we roll up our sleeves and give our customers and the Internet community a new capability (i.e. a gift) every day of our birthday week.

Some of this past week’s launches have been entirely new offerings, like providing key-value storage across Cloudflare’s global cloud network with Cloudflare Workers KV.  Other birthday week launches help improve the overall Internet ecosystem: the Bandwidth Alliance reduces data transfer charges from major cloud hosts and Cloudflare Registrar reduces the hidden fees typical of many domain registration providers. Other new offerings are focused on improving the Internet’s security and performance and are completely free to use. For example, Encrypted SNI helps fix one of the security holes in the Internet, and our support of the QUIC protocol promises to help make mobile browsing faster.  

We believe the only real way to help build a better Internet is to keep innovating, keep building, and keep launching -- every single day.  In fact, our prelude to this year’s Birthday Week was Crypto Week, a full week dedicated to announcing new technologies that use cryptography to make the Internet better.  No promises, but it is entirely imaginable that in coming years Cloudflare won’t just be celebrating a Birthday Week, but we’ll be launching new capabilities every day of a Birthday Month!

Below is a wrap-up of the capabilities launched this past week.

Cloudflare is fixing one of the core Internet bugs by keeping hostnames private using Encrypted Server Name Indication (SNI). All domains on Cloudflare using our authoritative name servers get Encrypted SNI enabled by default. Explore the protection of Encrypted SNI.

Cloudflare is looking forward to the standardization of the new QUIC protocol being developed by the IETF. Applications are being accepted for early access to our test implementation that allows developers to validate their QUIC deployments before supported web browsers become available. Learn more about QUIC.

The Bandwidth Alliance is a group of forward-thinking cloud and networking companies that are committed to discounting or waiving data transfer (also known as bandwidth) fees for shared customers.  Learn how the Bandwidth Alliance reduces costs.

Cloudflare Registrar lets you securely register and manage your domain name with transparent, no-markup pricing that eliminates surprise renewal fees and hidden add-on charges. Be one of the first to buy a domain or transfer your domain to Cloudflare. Register for early access to the Cloudflare Registrar.

Cloudflare Workers KV provides access to a secure low latency key-value store at all 153 Cloudflare data centers. Developers can use Cloudflare Workers and Workers KV to augment existing applications or to build entirely new applications on top of Cloudflare's global cloud network. Workers KV scales seamlessly to support applications serving dozens or millions of users. Explore how Workers KV allows for serverless key-value storage.

Another way we’ll soon be serving the Internet community is by hosting the fourth annual Cloudflare Internet Summit next week at our San Francisco office on Thursday, October 4th. We don’t spend any time talking about Cloudflare at the Internet Summit. Instead we facilitate discussions with the people who inspire and challenge us. The Internet Summit focuses on the future of the Internet and will feature a series of fireside chats, intimate panel discussions, and lively conversations from some of the brightest thought leaders, executives, entrepreneurs, researchers, and operators. Tickets are almost sold out, so register for the Cloudflare Internet Summit now or plan to tune in to our live stream!

At Cloudflare, our mission is to help build a better Internet. That means making the Internet faster, safer and smarter, but also more efficient alongside our cloud partners. As such, wherever we can, we're on the lookout for ways to help save our common customers money. That got us looking into why and how much cloud customers pay for bandwidth.

If you're hosting on most cloud providers, data transfer charges, sometimes known as "bandwidth” or “egress” charges, can be an integral part of your bill. These fees cover the cost of delivering traffic from the cloud all the way to the consumer. However, if you’re using a CDN such as Cloudflare, the cost of data transfer comes in addition to the cost of content delivery.

In some cases, charging makes sense. If you're hosted in a facility in Ashburn, Virginia and someone visits your service from Sydney, Australia there are real costs to moving traffic between the two places. The cloud provider likely hands off traffic to a transit provider or uses its own global backbone to carry the traffic across the United States and then across the Pacific, potentially handing off to other transit providers along the way, until eventually handing it off to the visitor's ISP. Someone has to maintain the expensive infrastructure that hauls the traffic the 9,739 miles from Ashburn to Sydney. It makes sense for the cloud provider to charge a customer to cover the cost of that transit or their own backbone.  For example, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure both send traffic over their highly available, secure, performant backbones of terrestrial fiber, subsea cable and more.  

For nearly all major cloud providers, traffic that is delivered to users via Cloudflare, passes across a private network interface (PNI) or private interconnection. That PNI typically occurs within the same facility through a fiber optic cable between routers for the two networks. Unlike when there's a transit provider in between, there's no middleman so neither Cloudflare nor the cloud provider bears incremental costs for transferring the data over this PNI. Cloud providers use these PNI’s to extensively interconnect with third party networks including Cloudflare’s.

Cloudflare automatically carries traffic from the user’s location to the Cloudflare data center nearest your cloud provider and then over such PNIs. Cloudflare is one of the most peered networks in the world, allowing traffic to be carried over such free interconnected links. We at Cloudflare acknowledge that specific customers with highly distributed infrastructures and bandwidth requirements can find it daunting to orchestrate workloads across multiple providers, and so not all traffic passes over such PNIs.

This got us to wonder: could we potentially create a new model and provide our mutual customers with lower costs? We started talking to the most customer-friendly cloud providers that we exchange traffic with and proposed that we look at making our highly efficient and growing interconnects further benefit our mutual customers.

So today — on the eve of Cloudflare's 8th birthday — we're excited to announce the Bandwidth Alliance: a group of forward-thinking cloud and networking companies that are committed to providing the best and most cost-efficient experience for our mutual customers.

Separately from our newly announced Bandwidth Alliance, we have been working with Google Cloud over the past three years as part of their CDN Interconnect program. That program, which Cloudflare has been a part of since its launch, discounts data transfer fees for mutual Cloudflare/Google Cloud customers by up to 75%. We have worked with Google Cloud to ensure that all our mutual customers now automatically get the discount on their bills without having to do anything. Thus, Google Cloud provides a reduced data transfer fee that will help customers save money in comparison to the standard data transfer fee and this is enabled by the high degree of settlement free peering with Cloudflare.

Microsoft Azure is working on its own CDN interconnect program. Cloudflare is excited to be part of this program and pass on the benefits to our mutual customers.

Thus, Google, and soon Microsoft Azure, provide a highly discounted data transfer fee that will help our mutual customers do more for less.

With the Bandwidth Alliance we wanted to go even further. First, beyond Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, we worked with several cloud and hosting providers including IBM Cloud to create a group of companies with whom you could get reduced data transfer fees. Second, we implemented a new smart routing system (to learn more read this technical blog post) to ensure that all our customers’ traffic on participating cloud providers could qualify for this offer. And, finally, we agreed with many other cloud providers to not just discount, but to waive data transfer fees entirely for mutual customers.

We are proud to announce the following cloud providers and hosting companies who have joined together with us in committing to reduced or zero bandwidth rates for mutual customers.  

Below is the list of companies from whom you’ll be able to get discounted or eliminated bandwidth fees as a Cloudflare customer. Click on each partner to learn more.

This is an open alliance of like-minded companies and we welcome other members to join whether they be cloud providers, hosting companies, or CDNs. If you are a cloud provider or networking company and aren't listed, we encourage you to email cloudflare-bandwidth-alliance@cloudflare.com with a request for inclusion.

The Bandwidth Alliance is providing this benefit to all Cloudflare customers at no additional cost. If you're hosted with a member of the Bandwidth Alliance, your data transfer fees should decrease when the required technical and accounting systems are activated by the member. Some of those systems are live today. Some are planning to go live over the months ahead.

To give you some sense, we estimate that current Cloudflare customers could save nearly $50 million in data transfer fees per year from hosting with a Bandwidth Alliance member as these programs come online.

Happy eighth birthday to all the Internet from the Bandwidth Alliance and us at Cloudflare. Enjoy your lower data transfer fees!

Here is what the founding members and customers say:

“At JPMorgan Chase, portability of workloads is essential as we drive a hybrid, multi-cloud strategy. Minimizing the friction of secure app and data mobility between clouds enables companies like ours to be more efficient, dynamic, and truly harness the full potential of cloud technologies,” said Larry Feinsmith, Managing Director and Head of Technology Strategy, Innovation and Partnerships.

“At Automattic we believe in making the web a better place, and part of that is enabling our customers to build and scale their web properties with freedom. We look forward to partnering with the Bandwidth Alliance to further this mission in allowing a freer flow of data on the internet,” said James Grierson, Global Partnerships, Automattic.

“We are excited to partner with Cloudflare to make our high-quality cloud storage more affordable and available than ever. For more than 10 years Backblaze has delivered the most cost effective cloud storage on the planet and being a founding member of the Bandwidth Alliance reinforces our continuing commitment of being transparent and trustworthy to our customers,” said Gleb Budman, CEO and co-founder, Backblaze.

“One of the reasons businesses use DigitalOcean is the significant amounts of bandwidth that we include with our compute and storage products at no additional cost,” said Shiven Ramji, VP, Product, DigitalOcean. “Our partnership with Cloudflare will improve on this by making it even more predictable for businesses to manage their cloud costs, and gain the benefits of the DigitalOcean Cloud and Cloudflare’s CDN.”

“IBM Cloud enables our clients to achieve greater business value by accelerating their journey to cloud to help them build, modernize and migrate their applications,” said Faiyaz Shahpurwala, general manager, IBM Cloud. "To further support our clients, we will expand our collaboration with Cloudflare through the Bandwidth Alliance to waive data transfer fees between IBM and Cloudflare servers for customers using the IBM Cloud Internet Services enterprise plan. This will help our clients enhance security and performance from the cloud to the edge without data transfer fees."

“At Linode, we’re focused on service, value, and simplifying the way developers consume our services. Our partnership with the Bandwidth Alliance will further our goal of providing affordable cloud computing services through predictable, pay as you go pricing," said Thomas Asaro, Chief Operations Officer, Linode.

"At Packet, we're driven to make infrastructure a competitive advantage for our customers," said Ihab Tarazi, CTO at Packet. "Partnering with Cloudflare to wipe out bandwidth transfer fees between our networks was a no-brainer, as both Cloudflare and Packet share a common goal: to build a better, stronger and faster Internet."

"Scaleway, since 2005, provides ultra easy, high performance infrastructure and services to allow our customers to build and scale appliances. We were the first hosting company to offer unlimited and unmetered connectivity, it’s a part of our DNA. We are excited to join the Bandwidth Alliance to further our mission to meet our customers demand to scale on the cloud." Said Arnaud de Bermingham, CEO, Scaleway.

“Vapor IO is delivering the next generation internet by enabling high performance applications at the edge of the wireless network. Our unique edge colocation business allows CDNs, cloud providers and web scale companies to place IT equipment in close proximity to cell towers where they can leverage software-defined interconnections to cross connect or peer with virtually any carrier, private data center, or cloud provider. We are excited to be part of the Bandwidth Alliance to accelerate edge deployments by not charging our mutual customers egress fees.” said  Matthew Trifiro, CMO, Vapor IO.

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