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Cloudflare Launches Storage Alternative to 'Exorbitant' AWS S3
A new object storage service from Cloudflare is taking aim at Amazon S3's data transfer costs.
Cloudflare R2 Storage, unveiled Tuesday, will let developers store "large amounts of data" in Cloudflare's edge network without charging them egress fees, which the company calls "egregious" -- especially with regard to AWS' Simple Storage Service (S3).
According to the AWS S3 pricing data page, generally, transferring data from Amazon S3 can cost anywhere from $0.01 to $0.09 per GB depending on where it's going (data transfers from S3 to the Internet cost more than data transfers between S3 and another AWS service). There are also no-cost tiers; the first 1GB of data transfered from S3 in a month is free, as are data transfers from S3 to Amazon CloudFront.
Cloudflare's offering promises to charge developers zero egress fees.
"Since AWS launched S3, cloud storage has attracted, and then locked in, developers with exorbitant egress fees," said Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince in a prepared statement. "We want developers to keep developing, not worrying about their storage bill. Our aim is to make R2 Storage the least expensive, most reliable option for storing data, with no egress charges."
The company is also promising overall object storage costs that are 10 percent cheaper than AWS, as well as no-cost access to infrequently requested data.
Cloudflare says it's making it easy for developers to switch to its storage service: "Cloudflare R2 Storage will include automatic migration from other S3-compatible cloud storage services that migrate data from providers as it's requested."
More information on Cloudflare R2 Storage is available here.