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

blog.cloudflare.com

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

#61

Post by [deleted] »

eastdakota wrote: post #43
Strom wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 expressl…

That limitation doesn’t apply to the R2 service or Workers generally. We’ll update and clarify our ToS. Thanks for flagging!

[deleted]

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

#62

Post by sudhirj »

numair wrote: post #58

There is one major reason S3 remains the king of storage for mobile media uploads: bucket notifications. Does R2 implement this feature? If so, I’m going to have to run some experiments with this...

To be honest, I think the biggest draw will be for companies (like where I work) that put large objects on S3 and distribute it to hundreds / thousands / millions of customers. The egress direct from S3 is on the order of 8 cents a GB, and with Cloudfront in front of it it’s a few cents lower, and you can negotiate pricing a little lower if you’re big enough. But not an order of magnitude.

We’d stick R2 in front of an S3 bucket and wipe off a the biggest portion of our bill.

S3 does absolutely have a ton of other stuff like events, lifecycle, Glacier, Lambda etc and is plugged into the AWS ecosystem, so I doubt we’re exiting it completely. But this is a solid option as a front for egress from S3.

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

#63

Post by frakkingcylons »

wiradikusuma wrote: post #53

For those who don't want to wait, there's DigitalOcean Spaces ( https://www.digitalocean.com/products/spaces/ ). Disclaimer: I haven't used it, but planning to, since I already use their VPS.

Not that Spaces isn’t a good product, but there are countless S3 compatible object storage services.

This announcement is noteworthy because there’s no egress fees. Spaces still charges 1c per gigabyte for egress. Not comparable in that aspect.

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

#64

Post by numair »

wiradikusuma wrote: post #53

For those who don't want to wait, there's DigitalOcean Spaces ( https://www.digitalocean.com/products/spaces/ ). Disclaimer: I haven't used it, but planning to, since I already use their VPS.

Love the team at DigitalOcean but Spaces was NOT reliable the last time I played with it. It’s also lacking key features in lifecycle and notification areas. Maybe they’ve gotten things together in recent months/years and I haven’t gotten the update, but it was very “you get what you pay for” when I tried to stage a project using it in 2018/19.

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

#66

Post by sneak »

What's the censorship policy?

Is this going to be content-neutral, like Cloudflare was when fronting ISIS websites?

Or is this going to be fine-until-bad-PR, like when Cloudflare decided to stop hosting The Daily Stormer?

There is a special kind of lock-in when it comes to object storage, as generally you use something like this when the data is too big to store another copy of locally or at another provider. It's not like you can easily maintain provider independence, and if Cloudflare decides one day that some of your UGC in a bucket isn't something they want to host, what happens then?

Is the data lost forever because your account is nuked? Is there a warning or grace period?

I am hesitant to put any large amount of data into a service without a crystal clear statement on this, so that I can know up front whether or not a business needs to maintain a second, duplicate object store somewhere else for business continuity.

If Cloudflare in practice is going to nuke the account the moment your site ends up hosting something objectionable, this DR requirement (a second provider that also stores all objects) needs to be factored into a customer's costs. (It may be that the bandwidth savings still make it worth it to use Cloudflare even with double storage.)

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

#67

Post by greg-m »

the8472 wrote: post #52

> R2 is designed with redundancy across a large number of regions for reliability. We plan on starting from automatic global distribution and adding back region-specific controls for when data has to be stored locally, as described above. Does that mean automatic caching across regions? Low-latency read access everywhere without an extra CDN in front of it?

Hey, PM for R2 here.

We're still deciding on how we want to handle caching. We integrate with Workers, so manually caching is always possible. The catch is we're currently building for strong consistency - if we added a cache in front, we'd weaken that - so it will likely be a configuration option we add later.

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

#69

Post by greg-m »

numair wrote: post #58

There is one major reason S3 remains the king of storage for mobile media uploads: bucket notifications. Does R2 implement this feature? If so, I’m going to have to run some experiments with this...

Hey, PM for R2 here!

We're fully integrated with Workers, so you can write a Worker that calls additional logic when a request is made to the bucket's url.

We have notifications, where a change to the bucket invokes a worker with a specific event, on our roadmap, but have a bunch of other work prioritized ahead of them.

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

#70

Post by greg-m »

aclelland wrote: post #7

Really interesting, will R2 support lifecycle rules like S3 does? We write around 90 million files per month to S3, if we could replace that with R2 and have the files automatically expire after 30 days that'd be a pretty amazing price reduction for us.

Hey, I'm the PM for R2.

We support per-object TTLs, so this should work!

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