Cloudflare recently announced the general availability of R2 storage, an S3-compatible object storage without egress charges. The new service provides dynamic functionalities integrating with Cloudflare Workers.
Designed to provide low latency and high throughput storage, R2 storage takes advantage of a content delivery network that spans over 275 cities in more than 100 countries. Cloudflare provides three ways to access a R2 object: the Worker runtime API, to access a bucket from serverless code, S3 API compatibility, to access it using a S3-compatible API, and public buckets. Aly Cabral, VP of product at Cloudflare, writes:
Who stores data with the goal of never reading it? No one. Yet, every time you read data, the egress tax is applied. R2 gives developers the ability to access data freely, breaking the ecosystem lock-in that has long tied the hands of application builders.
Announced in preview a year ago and presented as a "zero egress fee object storage", R2 Storage claims to be the least expensive option for performant object storage with Cloudflare suggesting that its new option is at least 10% cheaper than Amazon S3 Standard. S3 Standard is the default and the most expensive option on AWS but other storage classes are significantly cheaper. Pratyaksh Singh, software development engineer at BukuWarung, comments:
This is quite exciting and money saving. The API is AWS S3 compatible, and from the examples, it seems like you just need to change the endpoint while creating the S3 client in your code. Though R2 allows you to specify a region, the only option is auto. R2 can be easily paired with Cloudflare's edge compute platform Workers (which is based on isolates).
The current release of R2 automatically selects a bucket location in the closest available region and it does not yet support object lifecycles, live migration without downtime or jurisdictional restrictions. Cabral adds:
While we don’t have plans to support regions explicitly, we know that data locality is important for a good deal of compliance use cases. Jurisdictional restrictions will allow developers to set a jurisdiction like the ‘EU’ that would prevent data from leaving the jurisdiction.
R2 pricing is based on the total volume of data stored and two classes of operations, "mutate state" and "read existing state". There are no egress fees and the free tier includes 10GB of storage.
Following the GA of R2 object storage, Cloudflare introduced the ability to store and retrieve Cloudflare logs on R2. In a "GA week", the content delivery network announced Cloudforce One, a threat operations and research team, and Cloudflare Adaptive DDoS Protection, a traffic profiling system for mitigating DDoS attacks.
