Question

Huge divergence in bandwidth allotment between app platform and regular droplets

In evaluating app platform, I am struck by the huge divergence between the reasonably generous outgoing bandwidth allotted cumulatively based on the number of “regular” droplets one pays for, vs. the very small and inelastic bandwidth allotment on the app platform.

In summary:

  • if we pay for e.g. 5 of the cheapest droplets, we get 5,000 GB of outgoing bandwidth (and this applies if the droplets are part of a k8s cluster as well).
  • if we have a single app platform deployment, it could utilize any number of droplets; its outgoing allotment would only ever be 100 GB outgoing

Can someone explain the rationale for this, especially in light of app platform nodes’ much higher cost vs. equivalent regular droplets?

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cemerick • January 15, 2021
Accepted Answer

Turns out this was addressed in an answer from @phildougherty to a question posed in October on the same topic:

As for the bandwidth costs, due to the nature of our partnership with Cloudflare to offer CDN/DDoS protection/Edge Routing/SSL it is not possible for us to offer the rock bottom bandwidth pricing that we offer today for droplet.

I don’t quite understand what math could lead cloudflare service to increase effective costs so dramatically, but in any case: I’ll second the further replies on that thread that the integrated CDN is of minor interest, especially given the additional costs it apparently implies.