Comment by onionisafruit
2 days ago
> internet traffic, especially egress traffic, still is absurdly expensive
Are they paying for significant egress? I would assume they primarily serve static files that can be on a cdn
2 days ago
> internet traffic, especially egress traffic, still is absurdly expensive
Are they paying for significant egress? I would assume they primarily serve static files that can be on a cdn
> I would assume they primarily serve static files that can be on a cdn
And someone gotta pay that CDN bill too.
On top of that come all the requests from CI pipelines that don't have a repository proxy at all or have it misconfigured, the AI scrapers and other bots, or DDoS skiddies wanting to take responsibility for taking down a major hoster.
I don't know what Cloudflare's economics are like, but R2 egress is free. You pay for storage and $0.36/million for cache misses, which should be a fairly small percentage.
If I had to build a public artifact repository today, that's what I would use. Apparently Maven Central is built on S3 and Fastly. We don't know the terms, but I'm guessing that is more expensive.
> I don't know what Cloudflare's economics are like, but R2 egress is free.
Cloudflare is not profitable [1], and has collected about 2 billion $ of external funding [2] in 16 years that eventually wants to be paid back.
I would not trust any business on the assumption Cloudflare keeps their stuff available for free. The enshittification and squeeze part is inevitable.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/NET/financials/annual...
[2] https://tracxn.com/d/companies/cloudflare/__IL42hIOXmhTb0V8O...
Hey, what if we had a Maven tax if our repo was in Java, and an NPM tax for repos in NPM, for a centrally-managed repo with vulnerability checks?
Unless you truly self-host, get your own ASN and do your own peering, you most likely pay egress. But that's not to say this is the only way to operate, if you manage your own ASN and peering, you stop paying per TB transferred and start paying for available bandwidth instead.
Given the technical chops, it wouldn't be impossible to actually run a FOSS non-profit for hosting FOSS packages and libraries.