Home technology networking Microsoft joins Cloudflare in an effort to bring down network costs

Microsoft joins Cloudflare in an effort to bring down network costs

Networking

CIO Bulletin
2018-09-27

The Bandwidth Alliance is here. This new group is led by Cloudflare and Microsoft just joined the initiative. The Bandwidth Alliance will try to bring down the price of bandwidth for many cloud customers all around the world.

The alliance already boasts to having the best cloud providers that include the likes of IBM Cloud, Scaleway, Dreamway, Digital Ocean, Automattic, Packet and now- Microsoft Azure. The aim of the alliance is to make the egress traffic free for mutual customers in the alliance.

Some of the participants in the alliance are willing to make it free but there are a few that are willing to offer a 75% discount on the overall bandwidth with Cloudflare. Cloudflare’s traffic management system Argo, will be responsible for optimizing the transfer costs.

The CEO of Cloudflare Matthew prince believes that the fee cuts may help its customers save about $50 million each year. He announced the Bandwidth Alliance on his company’s blog, detailing the benefits of such a networking alliance. He has also said that he hopes that other industry bigwigs like Amazon Web Services come and join the alliance. The alliance is open and other cloud providers are welcome to join in.