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Amazon S3 changed everything in the early 2000s when it put storage on top of REST APIs and HTTP. Their main bet was that “eventual consistency” would be good enough for most cases and they were right. Data was spread across availability zones with erasure coding, giving 99.999999999% durability through cross region replication. What began as just eight microservices grew to more than 300 by 2022, handling exabytes of data with sub millisecond response times. The pricing model came from the old colocation world, where bandwidth really cost money because companies paid for physical circuits and peering deals. AWS kept that idea and still charges $0.09 per gigabyte to send data out of their network. In reality, internet transit today costs about $0.0005 per gigabyte. That’s an 18,000% markup, making cloud providers around $68 billion a year. Cloudflare broke this model because it built its network differently.