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Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage, minus the egress fees

blog.cloudflare.com

11–20 of 220 posts

Re: Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage, minus the egress fees

#11
Very exciting. Object storage is getting really competitive and i love the naming scheme alliance - S3, B2 (Backblaze) and now R2, who will do one with a “1”?

On a serious note i’m wondering about the signed urls and ACL capabilities of the cloudflare offering cause this is something we use.

I’m also interested does R2 replace S3 and CloudFront at the same time? That’d be nice and one headache less.

Re: Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage, minus the egress fees

#12
post #11

Very exciting. Object storage is getting really competitive and i love the naming scheme alliance - S3, B2 (Backblaze) and now R2, who will do one with a “1”? On a serious note i’m wondering about the signed urls and ACL capabilities of the cloudflare offering cause this is something we use. I’m also interested does R2 replace S3 and CloudFront at the same time? That’d be nice and one headache less.

The Cloudflare offering supports their serverless Workers compute which would make signed URLs and ACLs trivial. Cloudflare certainly would also be replacing CloudFront.

Re: Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage, minus the egress fees

#13
post #9
post #5

Interesting pricing considering Backblaze is another Bandwidth Alliance member and they only charge $0.005/GBmonth (vs. $0.015/GBmonth). B2 + CloudFlare gives you a similar deal at a third the cost.

I'm excited because while B2 + Cloudflare is great, the speed+latency isn't the greatest for some applications. So there's definitely a place for R2 here to compete more with AWS S3 than B2.

I'm a fan of B2 as well, but for some use-cases they seriously need to up their game. They only have three datacenters (CA, AZ, and Amsterdam), they still don't have a public status page, their admin UI is lacking lots of features (like proper invoices and different 2FA options), their permission system is very basic and inflexible, and they are not integrating compute with storage like AWS already does and Cloudflare will eventually be able to. However they are impossible to beat on cost, and for me their latency has recently improved significantly and has become much more stable, so I'm not going to move anytime soon.

Re: Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage, minus the egress fees

#14
post #9
post #5

Interesting pricing considering Backblaze is another Bandwidth Alliance member and they only charge $0.005/GBmonth (vs. $0.015/GBmonth). B2 + CloudFlare gives you a similar deal at a third the cost.

I'm excited because while B2 + Cloudflare is great, the speed+latency isn't the greatest for some applications. So there's definitely a place for R2 here to compete more with AWS S3 than B2.

What kind of speed difference are you seeing with B2 vs S3?

Re: Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage, minus the egress fees

#15
post #5

Interesting pricing considering Backblaze is another Bandwidth Alliance member and they only charge $0.005/GBmonth (vs. $0.015/GBmonth). B2 + CloudFlare gives you a similar deal at a third the cost.

I recently started keeping about 30TB of ElasticSearch and Postgres backups in Backblaze B2. The price is great, but getting data in is not particularly easy as the Backblaze S3 API seems to fail a high proportion of requests when under load.

If R2 can be approximately as reliable on ingest as AWS/GCS/Azure is, but without the egress fees of the other major providers, then $0.015/GB-month seems like a pretty good deal.

Re: Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage, minus the egress fees

#16
Really curious to see how this goes. If they live up to the following paragraph, that's pretty game-changing:

>> This cheaper price doesn’t come with reduced scalability. Behind the scenes, R2 automatically and intelligently manages the tiering of data to drive both performance at peak load and low-cost for infrequently requested objects. We’ve gotten rid of complex, manual tiering policies in favor of what developers have always wanted out of object storage: limitless scale at the lowest possible cost.

The amount of effort it takes to understand and account for S3 Intelligent Tiering is somewhat mind-blowing so to get rid of all of that (and the corresponding fees) would be really nice and TheWayThingsShouldBe™ for the customer -- on top of that most users just don't even know S3 Intelligent Tiering exists so it'll be great if Cloudflare just handles that automatically.

We at https://vantage.sh/ (disclosure, I'm the Co-Founder and CEO) recently launched a cross-provider cost recommendation for CloudFront Egress to Cloudflare which was really popular and I can imagine doing something similar for S3 -> R2 once it is live and we are able to vet it.

Re: Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage, minus the egress fees

#17
As someone who took up making travel videos as a hobby, this is definitely on my radar.

Video files are large, although ~20 cents per video streamed for a small website is manageable (S3, Cloud Storage, Azure...), it's the potential for abuse that could drive my bill up that terrifies me, which is why I decided to stick to Hetzner VMs with their 20TB of free egress.

Re: Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage, minus the egress fees

#18

As someone who took up making travel videos as a hobby, this is definitely on my radar. Video files are large, although ~20 cents per video streamed for a small website is manageable (S3, Cloud Storage, Azure...), it's the potential for abuse that could drive my bill up that terrifies me, which is why I decided to stick to Hetzner VMs with their 20TB of free egress.

Have you seen their Stream product, any use? Came out of their last batch of features if I recall

https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/cloudflare-stream/

Re: Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage, minus the egress fees

#19
post #5

Interesting pricing considering Backblaze is another Bandwidth Alliance member and they only charge $0.005/GBmonth (vs. $0.015/GBmonth). B2 + CloudFlare gives you a similar deal at a third the cost.

Yes but you can only use B2 via CloudFlare for web pages. Using it as a data storage platform isn't allowed. Unless of course you're willing to pay handsomely via an enterprise contract, but then the pricing changes.

Use of the Services for serving video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content is prohibited, unless purchased separately as part of a Paid Service or expressly allowed under our Supplemental Terms for a specific Service. [1]

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[1] 2.8 Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/

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