Cloudflare enlists Microsoft, Google, Automattic, Backblaze, and other cloud companies in the Bandwidth Alliance, promising cheaper cloud networking costs
With one notable exception, Cloudflare has brought several major cloud and data center companies together in a new industry group called …
Context & Ripple Effects
This alliance is the payoff of a relationship arc that started years earlier: Google partnered with Cloudflare and other CDNs back in 2015 to speed content delivery (Google's 2015 CDN partnership), and both Google and Microsoft then took stakes in Cloudflare's $110M Fidelity-led round the same month. The Bandwidth Alliance formalizes those investor relationships into an industry group.
What changed today is scope: instead of pairwise peering deals, Cloudflare has assembled Microsoft, Google, Automattic, Backblaze and others into a named coalition promising cheaper cloud networking costs — with one notable holdout among the major clouds.
First-order effects
- Customers running workloads across member clouds get direct relief on data-transfer charges when traffic moves between those providers and Cloudflare's network, cutting one of the stickier line items in multi-cloud bills.
- The absent major cloud — Amazon, per the report's 'one notable exception' — is now visibly isolated on bandwidth pricing while its closest competitors sign onto the cost-cutting banner.
Second-order effects
- AWS faces competitive pressure to defend its egress-fee revenue model against a coalition that treats inter-cloud bandwidth as something to give away rather than bill for.
- Backblaze and Automattic gain a marketing lever against hyperscaler storage and hosting rivals: membership signals their customers can move data without punitive transfer costs.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, egress fees erode from a profit center into a commodity — a trajectory Cloudflare itself pushed further in 2021 when it launched R2 object storage explicitly forgoing data egress fees to undercut AWS.
- Coalition-based pricing like this points toward cloud lock-in weakening at the network layer, making it cheaper for customers to run multi-cloud architectures and harder for any single provider to tax data movement.
The trend: Cloud networking is moving from metered per-provider tolls toward commoditized, coalition-backed free or cheap data transfer, with egress fees as the battleground.