· 2 min read
Why The CDN Alliance Matters To Builders
How the CDN Alliance partnership makes content delivery more affordable for builders
We all know that content delivery is a costly thing, and of course wish to keep it at a bare minimum. It is true for complex, production grade systems as much as it is for projects made by solo entrepreneurs or hobbyists.
The Problem: Cloudflare Spending Guardrails
The other day I found myself building a static page on Cloudflare, which conditionally shows content based on a provided token in the URI. It serves as a one-time invite URL which leads to some uploaded media. The logic to verify the token is done in a Worker which queries a Redis store.
I like Cloudflare. It is easy to set up and get going for personal projects as much as it is for building professional products. The one thing I don’t like about it, though, is that you still cannot set a hard cap on spending in the platform. This means that whenever you’re in need of a tier that is not the basic free tier, you could find yourself in a messy situation. Common enough? Probably not, because you can set alerts, guardrails etc. But as cautious as you are - it’s another risk you are willing to accept nonetheless when using it. Since R2 is not included in the free tier, I had to search for alternatives.
The Solution: Backblaze B2 with CDN Alliance
Backblaze B2 storage provides a service that is pretty cheap, down to free almost for light usage, and it allows you to set a hard spending limit. Sounds great, and implementing it as the storage service behind a Cloudflare Worker was a breeze.
The real perk though, is that since 2023 Backblaze is part of the CDN Alliance.
What is the CDN Alliance?
The CDN Alliance is a global, independent non-profit organization whose mission is to connect, support and represent the global content-delivery network (CDN) industry and community.
As part of the partnership between its members, egress traffic from Backblaze B2 to Cloudflare is completely free. This meant I could presign B2 links for use in my Worker and not worry about egress costs. Although B2 is probably not as S3 compliant as R2, for basic object store use cases you should probably be fine, so consider coupling it with content delivery in your Cloudflare based stack.
