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Egress. A convenient little fee devs have to deal with when they want to get files out of storage.

While most devs swallow the bitter pill when they need to get files out of regularly accessed storages like S3, having to pay egress for object storage seems a little counter-intuitive when considering the overall ROI.

Add this to the list of reasons why infra teams avoid restructuring their object storage despite it being a drain on their cloud budgets.

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But wait! CloudFlare has a solution!

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The company that recently celebrated its 11th birthday has news that should excite devs everywhere. Pushing infrastructure further down the path of easy migration to cloud, CloudFlare has announced a new object storage that offers devs the option of storing large amounts of unstructured data while slashing all egress costs associated with accessing and migrating this data to multiple databases.

Say hello to CloudFlare's R2 👋

An S3 API compatible object storage that is set to make object storage easy to access, more reliable, and a whole lot cheaper!

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Taking egress out of the equation

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CloudFlare plans to go head-on with AWS S3 as becoming the choice for devs who want a convenient place to store large amounts of unstructured data, but also have no restrictions placed on them for how often they can access the data without having to pay an added fee.

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So that's ZERO service fees no matter the request rate.

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Enterprises usually make thousands of requests per second and paying an egress fee for access to files while it hurts, is just dealt with, devs who need reliable access to storage and only make single-digit requests should not have to bear the brunt of enterprise-level pricing.

CloudFlare intends to combat S3 by not only removing all retrieval fees but also slashing their storage costs to $0.015 per GB of data stored per month. Which as you must know, is a lot less expensive than most public cloud providers.

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A whole host of other guarantees

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But that's not all! R2, which according to CloudFlare, stands for "Really Requestable" comes packed with features that most devs on S3 are pretty familiar with and rely on.

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Here's what the CloudFlare R2 announcement has to say about the added advantages of migrating to R2:

• R2 can manage the intelligent tiering of data to drive performance at peak load while delivering a super low cost for infrequently requested objects
• R2 is set to include automatic migration from other S3-compatible cloud storage services
• CloudFlare guarantees that R2 is built to provide 99.999999999% of annual durability (Comparable to S3's promise)
• Easy to integrate with other CloudFlare products and auto integration with CloudFlare cache

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Sounds pretty darn good to us!

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When do you pick R2?

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CloudFlare's R2 should be a pretty logical pick when you want a storage that is inexpensive and doesn't come with a whole host of hidden costs. Here are some of the most viable use cases for R2 as we currently see it:

• When dealing with a whole host of IoT devices and you need a storage that can ingest large volumes of sensor data and store it at a low cost
• When you want to migrate data to multiple databases for analytics purposes and do not want to deal with added egress costs
• When you have a lot of unstructured data that needs to be accessed regularly or moved around with ease

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What workloads would you use R2 for? Drop a comment and let us know!

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