Cloudflare started the Bandwidth Alliance together with Microsoft, IBM and other cloud providers. This initiative aims to reduce the cost of sending data to customers when they use network services from the connected parties.
Cloud users now often receive ‘bandwidth’ or ‘outside bundle fees’ with their monthly bill. These costs are for maintaining the infrastructure and are sometimes required to send data to the other side of the world.
Cloudflare believes, however, that its customers would not have to pay to send their data over the network of an expensive cloud provider to go from the server to the user’s computer, reports ITPro. Instead, the data must be sent via the CDN provider’s network.
Reduced costs
The parties to the Bandwidth Alliance have undertaken to reduce the costs they impose on Cloudflare customers to offer web pages and other parts of the web. In return, Cloudflare takes on a larger share of the workload.
Currently, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Automattic, Digital Ocean, Backblaze, DreamHost, Packet, Scaleway, Vapor and Linode have signed up for the Alliance. A number of companies offer the service free of charge, others do so for a greatly reduced amount. This means that at least 75% of the costs will be deducted.
The reason the companies have come forward is because the costs to cloud providers are so low and in many cases Cloudflare can easily reduce these costs or remove them altogether when processing data. In addition, many providers use the same datacenters or connection partner and a crosslink is relatively easy to realize.
“We expect that when the Bandwith Alliance comes online, Cloudflare customers can save more than $50 million a year in bandwidth costs for the cloud,” said Rustam Lalkaka, director of product at Cloudflare. “Our promise through the Bandwidth Alliance is to pass on those cost savings to you, our mutual customers.”
The idea for the initiative would have arisen when Cloudflare was working on Google’s own CDN Interconnect program, of which Cloudflare has been a partner for the past three years. However, Google does not seem to be part of the Alliance.
Cloudflare-CEO Matthew Prince goes on to say that the company is trying to convince AWS to join.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.
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