Profiling 25,000 S3 Buckets: The Billion Dollar Opportunity for Cloudflare R2
Cloudflare's recent announcement for their S3 competitor, cleverly named R2, has been a major point of discussion in the infrastructure community. While there have been many opinions on what this announcement means for the infrastructure market, there has been less conversation about what this means for customers — and how to assess the opportunity cost of moving a workload from S3 to R2. The day after the announcement, we immediately had customers reaching out with interest and two very specific questions:
We will elaborate on the first question later, but our customers’ second question came as a surprise to us. One of the advantages of having thousands of users utilizing Vantage to help manage and understand their AWS costs is that we have access to a unique dataset, which we use to extrapolate the size of the market opportunity for Cloudflare. Assuming the market opportunity is large enough for Cloudflare, we can help our customer build trust that Cloudflare is properly incentivized to invest their resources into building a service that will endure as long as Amazon S3 has.
In order to do a market opportunity estimation, we need to analyze some data. The end goal is to get an idea of how much AWS earns annually for its S3 object storage service and the percentage that Cloudflare's R2 has a reasonable shot at capturing.
