Availability of Cloudflare R2 Storage Distributed Object Storage

Cloudflare, Inc. announced that R2 Storage, the distributed object storage that eliminates egress costs, is generally available.

R2 Storage offers a better way for developers to store and access everything they need. Whether it’s storage for large media files, logs, or delivery of web assets, it offers flexibility with zero egress fees. R2 gives developers both an S3-compatible API, making for seamless migration and an integration with Cloudflare Workers, the company’s scalable serverless computing platform. Developers can focus on innovating – building the applications and websites they need – instead of worrying about high storage costs or vendor lock-in.

“Egress fees are nothing but a tax on developers, stifling innovation and creativity. We are redefining the standard of how developers work with object storage, allowing them to focus on innovation, rather than the costs of accessing their data. That is why R2 Storage will never have egress fees,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO. “Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet, which means we’re focused on making the Internet faster, safer, and also more affordable for everyone. We have been blown away by the initial interest in R2 Storage, and we encourage any developer that wants a better type of storage to sign up and switch to R2 today.”

In order to build websites and applications, developers need a place to store large amounts of unstructured data, photos, videos, and graphics that is accessible. However, many cloud providers today charge increasingly egregious bandwidth pricing for developers to access their data, resulting in unnecessarily expensive cloud storage, vendor lock-in, and an inability for developers to easily use the data they have stored. R2 Storage frees developers from this vendor lock-in with automatic migration of data from S3-compatible services to the firm’s performant, object store – minus the egress fees.

“The egress fees we were paying our existing storage provider to retrieve our own content had slowly increased to over six figures a year, and so we were looking for a way to reduce costs,” said Adam Gamble, CTO, Vecteezy, a design community and resource for high quality graphics. “We were excited to participate in the beta for our R2 and Cache Reserve to see what our potential cost savings could be. With the S3-compatible API, minimal changes were needed for our internal tools to work with the data stored in R2.” 

Since launching the R2 Storage service as an open beta 8 weeks ago, more than 11,000 developers have an active account with it.

With the availability of R2, developers are free to focus on innovation instead of worrying about the costs of storing their data, and can:

• Slash their cloud provider egress and storage bills: Company’s goal is to make R2 Storage the least expensive option for performant object storage, no matter the scale. That’s why the firm is on a mission to eliminate egress fees, deliver object storage that is at least 10% cheaper than S3 Standard, and make infrequent access completely free for customers. 

• Take advantage of performance of object storage built with Cloudflare’s global network: By leveraging Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects, R2 Storage provides low latency, high throughput storage for the most demanding applications. 

• Unlock power and scale of Cloudflare Workers within their applications: R2 Storage is integrated with the Cloudflare Workers runtime, making building data pipelines and manipulating objects easy. 

• Access data efficiently from anywhere: Company’s global network spans over 275 cities in more than 100 countries, so R2 Storage allows developers to reach global audiences without provisioning data centers around the world. 

• Integrate R2 Storage across firm’s product portfolio: Working with other company’s products like Access or Cache, developers can plug in R2 Storage across their entire Cloudflare environment. 

• Fit R2 Storage into existing workflows: With an S3-compatible API and Workers APIs, developers can easily migrate data out of S3 or use the power of the firm’s global network. Now, developers can work in whatever way is easiest for them to minimize the barrier of using R2 Storage.

Resources:
Blog: R2 is now Generally Available   
Developer documentation