Cloudflare R2 is an object storage platform that is part of the Cloudflare’s ecossystem and allows developers to store arbitraly large amounts of unstructured data in a secure and scalable way. The platform is suited for storing and delivering media files, such as images, videos, and audio, log files, sensor data, webpages, and more.
The platform is built on top of Cloudflare’s global network, which means that data is served from the edge, close to the end user, and is protected by Cloudflare’s security features. It can also be integrated with other Cloudflare products, such as Cloudflare Workers, to build serverless applications.
Common use cases of R2 include:
Cloudflare R2 can be a cost-effective alternative to platforms such as Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage, as it doesn’t charge for egress traffic, which means that there are no costs associated with data transfer out of the platform. R2 charges are based on the total volume of data storage along with two types of operations: Class A operations, or operations that mutate states, and Class B operations, or operations that read data.
The free plan includes 10GB of storage, 1 million Class A operations, and 10 million Class B operations per month. The paid plan is based in the pay as you go model, and charges $0.015 per additional GB of storage, $4.50 per additional million Class A operations, and $0.36 per additional million Class B operations.
Cloudflare R2 implements the S3 API, which means that it is compatible with existing S3 tools and libraries, and can be used as a drop-in replacement for S3 in many cases. For migrating data from AWS S3 to Cloudflare R2, you can use Cloudflare data migration tools that can be accessed from the Cloudflare dashboard. Two main services are available to help your: Super Sluper and Sippy.
Super Slupper, is a good choice if your S3 bucket stores objects less than 50GB and provide migration jobs that preserve custom metadata, do not delete any objects from the source bucket, and is secured by TLS encryption over HTTPS connections.
Slippy is still on beta, but it is a good choice if your S3 bucket stores objects larger than 50GB as it prevents the costs associated with egress bandwidth while migrating. This is because the service waits for an object to be requested before it is transferred to Cloudflare R2. When requested, if not yet on R2, Slippy will fetch it from S3, serve to the client, and store it on R2.