The latest new age S3 storage from Cloudflare

Was just reading the new announcement from Cloudflare about their new S3 compatible object storage offering:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2-object-storage/

A few key things to note:

  • Bandwidth usage doesn’t count in pricing - this is really huge advantage compared with the traditionally Amazon S3 - where you pay for your data transfers and downloads by your users

  • Migration on the flight - add your current S3 provider as secondary to Cloudflare R2 and your data will be migrated on the fly!

What do you think?

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This is a no brainer for me.

Right now I was using Scaleway as Object Storage provider and Cloudflare as CDN. As both are part of the Bandwidth Alliance I wouldn’t be charge for transferring from Scaleway to CF.

Now I can have everything on the same provider for a very low fee.

What will they do next? Cloud Computing?

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So now we have the 4th cloud services company right after Google.

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Am a big fan of CloudFlare services. Will be looking in to this further. We use Amazon S3 for storage and I’ll be honest it is really cheap and has some amazing features once you get down to it. BUT never good to have all your eggs in a single basket!

Thanks for posting about Cloudflare Workers @patrick!

Sounds amazing… but being “serverless”, will it support my HTML/PHP/MySQL Wappler app? :thinking:

@George

Any movement on CloudFlare R2 implementation?

:slight_smile:

Well you can try it yourself by using the option for custom s3 provider and entering the urls.

Let us know how it performs.

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Let me share the whole content of a newsletter about Cloudflare’s last October 3-4th announcements:

Cloudflare just disrupted 3 industries in 1 week

Last week, Cloudflare announced not one, but four major new features that could disrupt industries and make building your Minimum Viable Product significantly faster and cheaper.

1. Cloud storage with no egress fees
If you use Amazon S3, your biggest headache expense is the outbound transfer. Last week, CloudFlare announced R2 storage where they totally eliminate the bandwidth fees and only charge $0.015 per GB of data stored per month.

That’s even cheaper than DigitalOcean, which charges $5 for 250GB storage and 1TB transfer.

MVPs made possible due to this update: Anything that has to do with transferring lots of data. Say you have a product idea that required an average of 50TB outbound transfer per month.

With Amazon S3, you’d pay at least $4500 a month. With DigitalOcean, at least $505. With CloudFlare, well, it could be less than $10/month (it only depends on how much data you have stored).

2. Free/cheap real-time communication tools (WebRTC, livestreaming)
Cloudflare announced “WebRTC components”, an API for WebRTC using their global edge network. WebRTC is the technology behind many real-time apps (think apps like Zoom, FaceTime, live streams and so on). For WebRTC to work reliably, you need several components like STUN/TURN servers which can be expensive (take a look at Twilio’s pricing, for example).

Cloudflare’s WebRTC components will basically make this free, allowing you to offload TURN and STUN to their own huge network.

If you’re not a developer and want to use something that’s more nocode-ish, CloudFlare also announced “Stream Live”, a player that allows you to do live streaming/recording for $5 per 1000 minutes of video storage and $1 per 1000 minutes viewed.

MVPs made possible due to this update: Anything requiring real-time communication (one-to-one meeting apps, group calling apps, social video/gaming/sports, interactive apps and so on.) CloudFlare said they will raise the level of abstraction for their WebRTC API so you can think in terms of “participants, rooms and channels” instead of low-level details like how to configure the connection in the first place.

3. Tools to more easily build Web3 applications (Etherium and IPFS)
Welcome to the Web 3.0, where your software is decentralized and your users’ data truly belongs to them.

Web 3.0 also unlocks the Metaverse, a place where we trade in crypto and have NFTs as intellectual rights.

The only problem: Running and setting up the infrastructure for Web 2.0 apps is painful. Accessing it via the browser is (almost) impossible.

Cloudflare has announced their “Distributed Web Gateways” which should solve these problems. Developers will interact with HTTP calls, which CloudFlare will translate to PFS or Ethereum functions, while adding Cloudflare added-value services on the HTTP side.

MVPs made possible due to this update: Any application based on Etherium and smart contracts that you want to make more widely available and get more users.

Availability: These features are in beta and you can apply for early access (the instructions are at the bottom of each announcement). They will, however, become widely available soon enough, causing a flood of innovative SaaS and mobile apps (hopefully yours will be one of them!)

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@Fred_K I read the same recently, thanks for sharing. The storage fees on S3 are fine, but the egress…

Saying that S3 has been great and economical, especially for cold storage, but for any large chunks going outwards it can hurt. Hence going to be looking to migrate to CloudFlare in the next couple of weeks/month or so.

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They released R2 open beta.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/r2-open-beta/

Seems they also have D1 now :slight_smile:

Looks good!

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-d1/