Cloudflare recently announced the R2 Super Sluper feature, which enables developers to move all their data to R2 in one giant slurp or sip by sip through an intuitive UI and API. The feature is in private beta by signing up.
R2 is an S3-compatible, globally distributed object storage, allowing developers to store large amounts of unstructured data without the costly egress bandwidth fees commonly found with other providers. The service became generally available recently.
With the first iteration of the Super Sluper, developers can target an S3 bucket and import the objects they have stored there into your R2 bucket. By pointing to an existing S3 source, grant the R2 Super Slurper permissions to read the objects that need to migrate, and an asynchronous job will take care of the rest.
Source: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-r2-super-slurper/
In a Cloudflare blog post on the Super Slurper feature, Aly Cabral, VP of product management – Workers, explains the benefit of the feature:
You'll also be able to save the definitions and credentials to access your source bucket, so you can migrate different folders from within the bucket, in new operations, without having to define URLs and credentials all over again. This operation alone will save you from scripting your way through buckets with many paths you’d like to validate for consistency.
Furthermore, during the beta stages, the company will collect feedback to make the feature more consistent and include automatic sip-by-sip migration, which provides a way to incrementally copy objects to R2 as they get requested from an end-user. The latter will allow developers to copy their objects, previously scattered through one or even multiple buckets from other vendors while ensuring that everything requested from the end-user side gets served from R2.
Cloudflare’s R2 is a competitive offering towards the big public cloud offerings like AWS S3 and Microsoft’s Azure Storage. Anthony Batt, co-founder of Wevr, tweeted:
The cloud storage wars increase
In addition, Cabral also told InfoQ:
Our goal is to remove the friction and barriers that exist for developers to build, whether that is high egress fees or the challenges of migrating large amounts of data. We addressed the egress fees from the start, and our announcement of Super Slurper addresses the second.
Lastly, the company targets S3-compatible buckets and expects other sources to become available in 2023.
