15 ms·

From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

• nik736 3y ago
  S3 and R2 aside, OVHs object storage offering is really robust and great. It performs better than S3 and is way cheaper, in storage and egress cost.
  • drewnick 3y ago
    Agree. We've used it for two years with solid performance and reliability.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • 9dev 3y ago
    You might even say their offering is… on fire
• simonsarris 3y ago
  Cloudflare has been attacking the S3 egress problem by creating Sippy: https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/data-migration/sippy/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/data-migration/sippy/ It allows you to incrementally migrate off of providers like S3 and onto the egress-free Cloudflare R2. Very clever idea. He calls R2 an undiscovered gem and IMO this is the gem's undiscovered gem. (Understandable since Sippy is very new and still in beta)
  • ravetcofx 3y ago
    What are the economics that Amazon and other providers have egress fees and R2 doesn't? Is it acting as a loss leader or does this model still make money for CloudFlare?
    • NicoJuicy 3y ago
      You pay for the capacity of your network. Cloudflare has huge ingress, because they need it to protect sites against DDOS. They basically already pay for their R2 bandwidth ( = egress) because of that. Additionally, with their SDN ( software defined networking) they can fine-tune some of the Data-Flow/bandwidth too. That's how I understood it, fyi. Some more info could be found when they started ( or co-founded, not sure) the bandwidth alliance. Eg. https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/
      • miselin 3y ago
        Also, for the CDN case that R2 seems to be targeting - regardless of the origin of the data (R2 or S3), chances are pretty good that Cloudflare is already paying for the egress anyway.
        • NicoJuicy 3y ago
          I'm not sure about that. A CDN keeps the data nearby, reducing the need to pay egress to the big bandwidth providers. ( not an expert though)
          • ilc 3y ago
            Let's say you want to use cloudflare, or another CDN. The process is pretty simple. You setup your website and preferably DON'T have it talk to anyone other than the CDN. You then point your DNS to wherever the CDN tells you to. (Or let them take over DNS. Depends on the provider.) The CDN then will fetch data from your site and cache it, as needed. Your site is the "origin", in CDN speak. If Cloudflare can move the origin within their network, there is huge cost savings and reliability increases there. This is game changing stuff. Do not under estimate it.
        • kkielhofner 3y ago
          It's actually worse than that. In the CDN case Cloudflare has to fetch it from the origin, cache (store) it anyway, and then egress it. By charging for R2 they're moving that cost center to a profit one.
  • dangoldin 3y ago
    Author here and really cool link to Sippy. I love the idea here since you're really migrating data as needed so the cost you incur is really a function of the workload. It's basically acting as a caching layer.
  • paulddraper 3y ago
    Clever
  • ignoramous 3y ago
    CacheReserve is a neat way to relegate S3 and front it with R2 instead: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/advanced-configuration/cache-reserve/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/advanced-configurati... And, if you're in the same boat as someone down-thread complaining about Cloudflare's uptime in recent weeks, you can keep S3 + Cloudfront (or Lightsail Buckets + Lightsail CDN) and S3 + CacheReserve on R2, which is what we do, and flip between them with DNS.
• threatofrain 3y ago
  Cloudflare has been building a micro-AWS/Vercel competitor and I love it; i.e., serverless functions, queues, sqlite, kv store, object store (R2), etc.
  • camkego 3y ago
    I would love to see a good blog post or article on Cloudflares KV store. I just checked it out, and it reports eventual consistency, so it sounds like it might be based upon CRDTs, but I'm just guessing.
  • davidjfelix 3y ago
    FWIW, Vercel is at least partially backed by cloudflare services under the hood.
    • zwily 3y ago
      Right - Vercel's edge functions are just cloudflare workers with a massive markup.
  • chatmasta 3y ago
    Vercel doesn't offer any of that, without major caveats (e.g. must use Next.js to get a serverless endpoint). And to the degree they do offer any of it, it's mostly built on infrastructure of other companies, including Cloudflare.
    • deleted 3y ago
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  • mike_d 3y ago
    Cloudflare is just reimplementing every service that Akamai has had for 10 years. The only difference is Cloudflare is going after the <$100/mo customer.
• paulgb 3y ago
  Since I know there will be Cloudflare people reading this (hi!), I'm begging you: please wrestle control of the blob storage API standard from AWS. AWS has zero interest in S3’s API being a universal standard for blob storage and you can tell from its design. What happens in practice is that everybody (including R2) implements some subset of the S3 API, so everyone ends up with a jagged API surface where developers can use a standard API library but then have to refer to docs of each S3-compatible vendor to see figure out whether the subset of the S3 API you need will be compatible with different vendors. This makes it harder than it needs to be to make vendor-agnostic open source projects that are backed by blob storage, which would otherwise be an excellent lowest-common-denominator storage option. Blob storage is the most underused cloud tech IMHO largely because of the lack of a standard blob storage API. Cloudflare is in the rare position where you have a fantastic S3 alternative that people love, and you would be doing the industry a huge service by standardizing the API.
  • londons_explore 3y ago
    I think the subtle API differences reflect bigger and deeper implementation differences... For example, "Can one append to an existing blob/resume an upload?" leads to lots of questions about data immutability, cacheability of blobs, etc. "What happens if two things are uploaded with the same name at the same time" leads into data models, mastership/eventual consistency, etc. Basically, these 'little' differences are in fact huge differences on the inside, and fixing them probably involves a total redesign.
    • paulgb 3y ago
      This is a good point, but just a standard for the standard create/read/update (replace)/delete operations combined with some baseline guarantees (like approximately-last-write-wins eventual consistency) would probably cover a whole lot of applications that currently use S3 (which doesn't support appends anyway). Heck, HTTP already provides verbs that would cover this, it would just require a vendor to carve out a subset of HTTP that a standard-compliant server would support, plus standardize an auth/signing mechanism.
• maxclark 3y ago
  R2 and Sippy solve a specific pipeline issue: Storage -> CDN -> Eyeball The real issue is how that data get's into S3 in the first place and what else you need to do with it. S3 and DynamoDB are the real moats for AWS.
• tehlike 3y ago
  If you are storing large amount of data: E2 is the cheapest (20$/TB/year, 3x egress for free) If you are having lots of egress: R2 is the cheapest (15$/TB/month, free egress) R2 can get somewhat expensive if you have lots of mutations, which is not a typical use case for most.
  • tehlike 3y ago
    B2 is also nice at 6$/TB/mo and 3x free egress. You can proxy things through cloudflare and get unlimited free egress thanks to bandwidth alliance between cf and b2
  • vladvasiliu 3y ago
    What's E2? Top google result for "e2 blob storage" is azure, but that can't be it since the pricing table comes at around $18/TB/month.
    • maccam912 3y ago
      I imagine it was a typo for backblaze B2? The call out that egress is free for the first 3x of what you have stored matches up.
      • wfleming 3y ago
        That’s what I thought they meant as well, but B2 is more like $72/TB/yr. Maybe relevant to another story on the front page right now, they have a very unusual custom keyboard layout that makes it easy to typo e for b and 2 for 7 ;)?
        • tehlike 3y ago
          Idrive e2 https://www.idrive.com/object-storage-e2/pricing https://www.idrive.com/object-storage-e2/pricing
    • natrys 3y ago
      Seems to be this one: https://www.idrive.com/object-storage-e2/ https://www.idrive.com/object-storage-e2/
• arghwhat 3y ago
  I wish the R2 access control was similar to S3 - able to issue keys with specific accesses to particular prefixes, and ability to delegate ability to create keys. It currently feels a little limited and… bolted on to the Cloudflare UI.
  • andrewstuart 3y ago
    I think the idea is to use Cloudflare Workers to add more sophisticated functionality.
    • slig 3y ago
      But then you start paying for Worker's bandwidth, correct?
      • andrewstuart 3y ago
        https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-now-even-more-unbound/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-now-even-more-unbound/
    • arghwhat 3y ago
      But then I’m forced to write server code where previously I needed none.
• meowface 3y ago
  Is there any reason to not use R2 over a competing storage service? I already use Cloudflare for lots of other things, and don't personally care all that much about the "Cloudflare's near-monopoly as a web intermediary is dangerous" arguments or anything like that.
  • Hasz 3y ago
    As far as I know, R2 offers no storage tiers. Most of my s3 usage is archival and sits in glacier. From Cloudflare's pricing page, S3 is substantially cheaper for that type of workload.
    • thrtythreeforty 3y ago
      I know people archive all kinds of data. I use Glacier as off-site backup for my measly 1TB of irreplaceable data. But I know many customers put petabytes in it. What could you have a petabyte of that you're pretty sure you'll never need again? What kind of datasets are you storing?
      • Dylan16807 3y ago
        > pretty sure you'll never need again? It doesn't have to be nearly that stark. If we factor out egress, since it's the same for everything, the bulk retrieval cost for glacier deep archive is only $2.50/TB. That means that a full year of storage ($12) plus four retrievals ($10) is roughly the same price as a single month of normal S3 storage ($23).
      • Hasz 3y ago
        long term work stuff. Things we would be contractually obligated to produce many years down the line. Plenty of other people storing images, video, etc. a PB is really not that much stuff when it's not just for personal consumption.
  • gurchik 3y ago
    1. This is the most obvious one, but S3 access control is done via IAM. For better or for worse, IAM has a lot of functionality. I can configure a specific EC2 instance to have access to a specific file in S3 without the need to deal with API keys and such. I can search CloudTrail for all the times a specific user read a certain file. 2. R2 doesn't support file versioning like S3. As I understand it, Wasabi supports it. 3. R2's storage pricing is designed for frequently accessed files. They charge a flat $0.015 per GB-month stored. This is a lot cheaper than S3 Standard standard pricing ($0.023 per GB-month), but more expensive than Glacier and marginally more expensive than S3 Standard - Infrequent Access. Wasabi is even cheaper at $0.0068 per GB-month but with a 1 TB billing minimum. 4. If you want public access to the files in your S3 bucket using your own domain name, you can create a CNAME record with whatever DNS provider you use. With R2 you cannot use a custom domain unless the domain is set up in Cloudflare. I had to register a new domain name for this purpose since I could not switch DNS providers for something like this. 5. If you care about the geographical region your data is stored in, AWS has way more options. At a previous job I needed to control the specific US state my data was in, which is easy to do in AWS if there is an AWS Region there. In contrast R2 and Wasabi both have few options. R2 has a "Jurisdictional Restriction" feature in Beta right now to restrict data to a specific legal jurisdiction, but they only support EU right now. Not helpful if you need your data to be stored in Brazil or something.
• benjaminwootton 3y ago
  The other hidden cost when you are working with data hosted on S3 is the LIST requests. Some of the data tools seem very chatty with S3, and you end up with thousands of them when you have small filed buried in folders with a not insignifcant cost. I need to dig into it more, but they are always up there towards the top of my AWS bills.
  • deleted 3y ago
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• thedaly 3y ago
  > In fact, there’s an opportunity to build entire companies that take advantage of this price differential and I expect we’ll see more and more of that happening. Interesting. What sort of companies can take advantage of this?
  • diamondap 3y ago
    Basically any company offering special services that work with very large data sets. That could be a consumer backup system like Carbonite or a bulk photo processing service. In either case, legal agreements with customers are key, because you ultimately don't control the storage system on which your business and their data depend. I work for a non-profit doing digital preservation for a number of universities in the US. We store huge amounts of data in S3, Glacier and Wasabi, and provide services and workflows to help depositors comply with legal requirements, access controls, provable data integrity, archival best practices, etc. There are some for-profits in this space as well. It's not a huge or highly profitable space, but I do think there are other business opportunities out there where organizations want to store geographically distributed copies of their data (for safety) and run that data through processing pipelines. The trick, of course, is to identify which organizations have a similar set of needs and then build that. In our case, we've spent a lot of time working around data access costs, and there are some cases where we just can't avoid them. They can really be considerable when you're working with large data sets, and if you can solve the problem of data transfer costs from the get-go, you'll be way ahead of many existing services built on S3 and Glacier.
  • dangoldin 3y ago
    Author here but some ideas I was thinking about: - An open source data pipeline built on top of R2. A way of keeping data on R2/S3 but then having execution handled in Workers/Lambda. Inspired by what https://www.boilingdata.com/ https://www.boilingdata.com/ and https://www.bauplanlabs.com/ https://www.bauplanlabs.com/ are doing. - Related to above but taking data that's stored in the various big data formats (Parquet, Iceberg, Hudi, etc) and generating many more combinations of the datasets and choose optimal ones based on the workload. You can do this with existing providers but I think the cost element just makes this easier to stomach. - Abstracting some of the AI/ML products out there and choosing best one for the job by keeping the data on R2 and then shipping it to the relevant providers (since data ingress to them is free) for specific tasks. -
• xrd 3y ago
  I just love minio. It is a drop-in replacement for S3. I have never done a price comparison for TOC to S3 or R2, but I have a good backup story and run it all inside docker/dokku so it is easy to recover.
  • ies7 3y ago
    We went from s3 to minio because cost issues (at that time b2 didn't have s3 API) Minio to seaweedfs around 2020 because our minio servers had problems serving very large number of small files. Then this year we migrate to B2 because it's way cheaper and we don't have to rewrite our apps. Still my hat goes to S3. It is so massive that every open source or competitors need to have compatible API and it give us the ability to move to any vendor or selfhost just by changing endpoint.
• hipadev23 3y ago
  OP is missing that a correct implementation of Databricks or Snowflake will have those instances are running inside the same AWS region as the data. That's not to say R2 isn't an amazing product, but the egregious costs aren't as high since egress is $0 on both sides.
  • dangoldin 3y ago
    Author here and it is true that costs within a region are free and if you do design your system appropriately you can take advantage of it but I've seen accidental cases where someone will try to access in another region and it's nice to not even have to worry about it. Even that can be handled with better tooling/processes but the bigger point is if you want to have your data be available across clouds to take advantage of the different capabilities. I used AI as an example but imagine you have all your data in S3 but want to use Azure due to the OpenAI partnership. It's that use case that's enabled by R2.
    • hipadev23 3y ago
      Yeah, for greenfield work building up on R2 is generally a far better deal than S3, but if you have a massive amount of data already on S3, especially if it's small files, you're going to pay a massive penalty to move the data. Sippy is nice but it just spreads the pain over time.
      • Dylan16807 3y ago
        > Sippy is nice but it just spreads the pain over time. That egress money was going to be spent with or without sippy. It's not "just spreading" the pain, it's avoiding adding any pain at all.
  • cmgriffing 3y ago
    I could be mistaken, but I believe AWS would still charge for one direction of an S3 to Databricks/Snowflake instance/cluster.
    • 3y ago
• drexlspivey 3y ago
  If I understand correctly when storing data to vanilla S3 (not their edge offering) the data live in a single zone/datacenter right? While on R2 they could potentially be replicated in tens of locations. If that is true how can Cloudflare afford the storage cost with basically the same pricing?
  • mike_d 3y ago
    It is clever marketing. Your object in R2 is stored globally as in it might reside anywhere, but they do not actually replicate the object globally.
  • electroly 3y ago
    S3 Standard guarantees that your data is replicated to three availability zones within the region at minimum. (That's different data centers in the same city.) My assumption is that "at least three" means "exactly three" in practice.
• leiferik 3y ago
  As an indie dev, I recommend R2 highly. No egress is the killer feature. I started using R2 earlier this year for my AI transcription service TurboScribe (https://turboscribe.ai/ https://turboscribe.ai/). Users upload audio/video files directly to R2 buckets (sometimes many large, multi-GB files), which are then transferred to a compute provider for transcription. No vendor lock-in for my compute (ingress is free/cheap pretty much everywhere) and I can easily move workloads across multiple providers. Users can even re-download their (again, potentially large) files with a simple signed R2 URL (again, no egress fees). I'm also a Backblaze B2 customer, which I also highly recommend and has slightly different trade-offs (R2 is slightly faster in my experience, but B2 is 2-3x cheaper storage, so I use it mostly for backups other files that I'm likely to store a long time).
  • munkinasack 3y ago
    Have you looked into Worker AI? I’m actually curious to know what the cost difference would be for your compute setup vs. Workers AI
    • leiferik 3y ago
      The premise of Workers AI is really cool and I'm excited to see where it goes. It would need other features (custom code, custom models, etc) to make it worth considering for my needs, but I love that CF is building stuff like this.
• jokethrowaway 3y ago
  It blows my mind that anyone would consider S3 cheap. You always had available plenty of space on dedicated servers for way cheaper before the cloud. You could make an argument about the API being nicer than dealing with a linux server - but is AWS nice? I think it's pretty awful and requires tons of (different, specific, non transferable) knowledge. Hype, scalability buzzwords thrown around by startups with 1000 users and 1M contract with AWS. Sure R2 is cheaper but it's still not a low cost option. You are paying for a nice shiny service.
  • gen220 3y ago
    I think it all depends on the volume of data you're storing, access requirements, and how much value you plan to generate per GB. It's certainly quite cheap for a set of typical "requirements" for media hosting companies. But yeah, if you're storing data for mainly archival purposes, you shouldn't be paying for R2 or S3.
• sgammon 3y ago
  We absolutely love R2, especially when paired with Workers.
• johnklos 3y ago
  Should we simply ignore the tremendous amount of phishing hosted using r2.dev? Or is this also part of "an economic opportunity"? Cloudflare may well be on their way to becoming a monopoly, but they certainly show they don't care about abuse. Even if it weren't a simple matter of principle, in case they aren't successful in forcing themselves down everyone's throats, I wouldn't want to host anything on any service that hosts phishers and scammers without even a modicum of concern.
  • supriyo-biswas 3y ago
    I’ve seen lots of phishing websites hosted on S3, with responses from AWS coming weeks late.
• andrewstuart 3y ago
  >> you’re paying anywhere from $0.05/GB to $0.09/GB for data transfer in us-east-1. At big data scale this adds up. At small data scale this adds up. And..... it's 11 cents a GB from Australia and 15 cents a GB from Brazil. If you have S3 facing the Internet a hacker can bankrupt your company in minutes with simple load testing application. Not even a hacker. A bug in a web page could do the same thing.
  • paulddraper 3y ago
    200 TB in minutes is impressive. (Assuming your company can be bankrupted for ~$20k.)
  • thenickdude 3y ago
    At small data scale you fit within the 100GB/month free tier for S3 or 1TB/month free tier for Cloudfront (in front of an S3 backend).
• josevalerio 3y ago
  Here’s a tweet from Corey Quinn describing how bonkers R2 pricing is: > let’s remember that the internet is 1-to-many. If 1 million people download that 1GB this month, my cost with @cloudflare R2 this way rounds up to 13¢. With @awscloud S3 it’s $59,247.52. https://x.com/quinnypig/status/1443076111651401731?s=46 https://x.com/quinnypig/status/1443076111651401731?s=46
  • mt_ 3y ago
    Won't you have the same problem with R2, once your data is in that provider?
    • stingraycharles 3y ago
      No, because CloudFlare doesn’t charge for egress traffic.
  • stingraycharles 3y ago
    To be fair, 1 million downloads @ 1GB is a lot of data transfer. CloudFlare is likely losing money on this.
    • 12907835202 3y ago
      I'm abusing the hell out of it right now offering GB+ downloads that I used to use Digital Ocean Spaces for. It's saving me $2000-3000 a month since the switch. Maybe abuse isn't the right word but definitely making the most. I am a bit scared about being turned off overnight though.
      • eastdakota 3y ago
        Not abuse. Thanks for being a customer. Bandwidth at scale is effectively free.
      • hnwizard 3y ago
        Just for the sake of enlightening some people. Roughly $1000 per month buys you unlimited/unmetered 10GBe (10GBps) connectivity to your server/rack (do you know what this is?), from a tier-1 network provider. This translates to roughly 1.2 gigabytes per second (every second of of the month), and 3240 terabytes of data per month - in or out, the choice is yours. Things scale down as you buy more bandwidth, or commit to a longer contract. Many would say that $1000 per month is literally "nothing" in terms of costs of service for most real businesses our there, and if you're a happy CSP user, you're probably paying a hell of a lot more than that per month for your infra.
• hintymad 3y ago
  Did Cloudflare share any information on how R2 is built? Like what kind of open source systems they use as the foundation or they built it from scratch?
• manishsharan 3y ago
  Backblaze B2 ftw!
• BohuTANG 3y ago
  We(Databend Labs) benchmarked #TPCH-SF100 on S3, Wasabi, Backblaze B2, and Cloudflare R2: #S3 leads with its direct connect feature. #Wasabi offers good performance. #B2 and #R2 may not be suitable for big data needs Details: https://twitter.com/DatabendLabs/status/1719580350677237987 https://twitter.com/DatabendLabs/status/1719580350677237987
• up2isomorphism 3y ago
  The problem here is as long as cloud services are sticky, moving your data doesn’t really solve the vendor locking, egress is just one way to leverage that characteristic, I can easily come up with another ten way to charge you as long as you can’t not easily migrate your stacks off a cloud platform.
• kbumsik 3y ago
  There are some dealbreakers to me. 1. No Object history and locking. So there is absolutely no way to recover files when you do any kinds of mistakes. 2. No object tiering and storage is not that cheap. Although R2 egress is free, R2 is only 35% cheaper than S3 in terms of storage, but it is not cheaper than other alternatives. Furthermore, R2 is a lot more expensive than S3 infrequent/cold tier. For example, Backblaze B2 is 4 times cheaper than S3, and B2 offers history/locking. When B2 egress is free up to 3x monthly storage, B2 is much better option than R2 for most cases if a considerably high egress is not needed.
  • Dylan16807 3y ago
    I'm curious how the performance compares these days. The last time I benchmarked B2 was years ago but it wasn't as reliable as I wanted at getting me files in under two seconds.
  • breakingcups 3y ago
    Although it's probably faded from everyone's mind, I think Cloudflare and Backblaze still have the Bandwidth Alliance going which means free egress if you combine them.
• tlarkworthy 3y ago
  I did some like-for-like comparisons across S3 vendors. S3 perf is way better than the challengers, R2 is the worst performer. Also it doesn't support concurrency on list operations, or object versions. So it's a bit more complex than "R2 is best coz it's cheapest" it's not super optimized yet https://twitter.com/tomlarkworthy/status/1711846776905293967?t=rqaQXsuNWMsvcSTSG1m0Nw&s=19 https://twitter.com/tomlarkworthy/status/1711846776905293967...
• zmmmmm 3y ago
  But what are you going to do with your data in R2? They don't have all the other cloud services to use the data. Unless your only use of the cloud is literally for raw storage, it's not that practical. Compare with say Oracle cloud which tries to compete by having 1/10th the egress charge. But nobody uses it anyway and they DO offer all the other services.
  • weird-eye-issue 3y ago
    Yeah if you want to completely ignore Cloudflare Workers, Durable Objects, etc then that comparison makes sense I guess... but wait that is only if you also wanted to ignore that you can serve the files publicly directly so that alone has many use cases as well esp with the free bandwidth
  • andrewstuart 3y ago
    You could use a computer to access your R2 files - a computer from anywhere on the Internet.
• stpedgwdgfhgdd 3y ago
  For the Cloudflare fans out there (i am one of them), it seems that the sales/finance guys entered the company and start to apply the usual upsell tricks. (See the advanced firewall and bots stuff) Perhaps i’m too hasty with my judgement, hope so….
• lysecret 3y ago
  R2 is a nice and cheap service, I just want to caution people, it does have a reduced feature set than something more mature than S3 or GCS, for most people who just want to server an image etc, it's fantastic though.
• elephantum 3y ago
  I read this and cannot believe that I can optimize our $5-6K GCP egress bill to zero. Just wow.
• cwilper 3y ago
  What would be great is a tiered storage service or library where oft-accessed data is in R2 and infrequently accessed has metadata in R2 but blobs in the cheaper S3 storage tiers or Glacier.
• levifig 3y ago
  We moved entire infrastructure to AWS last year, to speed up/simplify/rethink it. We lasted 3 months on S3/CloudFront. We are still heavily invested in AWS, but moved our production storage/distribution to R2/Cloudflare and couldn't be happier. Next up: moving our cloud edge (NAT Gateways, WAF, etc) to Fortinet appliances, which licenses we purchased bundled with our on-prem infra. I know Corey Quinn always harps on AWS' egress pricing but you really can't emphasize it enough: it's literally extortionary!
• meowface 3y ago
  It looks like Backblaze B2 combined with Cloudflare gives the cheapest storage and free egress. Is there any reason to use R2 over B2 + Cloudflare? My use case is image storage + serving for a service that users will upload a lot of images to. Currently using Cloudflare + storing all files on disk but space will soon become a concern.
• sydbarrett74 3y ago
  My fear is that as R2 becomes more 'discovered' and adopted, Cloudflare will hike prices since they'll have a captive audience.
  • klysm 3y ago
    It seems so inevitable. Once they have sucked enough data up then they can just change the pricing structure to have egress fees and higher storage fees. Although I do wonder if that would be considered a bait and switch.
• apitman 3y ago
  Interesting side note that while S3 the service continues to get more competition, S3 the protocol has definitively won. It's a good protocol, but man I wish it were more consumer-friendly. Imagine if S3 specified an OAuth2 profile for granting access. Every web app could delegate storage to a bunch of competing storage providers. This would be very useful in genomics, where pretty much everything is stored on S3 but always a pain to connect to apps.
• redwood 3y ago
  The simple reason cloudflare hasn't emerged as a real competitor is that they don't offer traditional compute therefore you can't just do what you normally would do in the hyperscalers in the clouflare regions. If they really are trying to be a fourth hyperscaler and/or compete on price it feels like generql compute is what they need. What am I missing