Cloudflare R2
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
R2 is Cloudflare's S3-compatible object storage with one killer feature: zero egress fees. Every time you read data from S3, AWS charges you. R2 says 'nah, that's free.' It's the same API as S3 so migration is easy. It's like S3 but your CFO actually smiles when reviewing the bill.
Real Talk
Cloudflare R2 is S3-compatible object storage that eliminates egress bandwidth charges. It's accessible via the S3 API, Cloudflare Workers, or REST API, and automatically distributes data across Cloudflare's network. It supports multipart uploads, presigned URLs, and lifecycle policies. Ideal for workloads with high read volumes.
When You'll Hear This
"We moved our assets to R2 and our egress bill went from $5K/month to zero." / "R2 is S3-compatible so we just changed the endpoint URL."
Related Terms
Blob Storage
Blob storage is just a fancy name for storing unstructured data — images, videos, PDFs, audio files, any binary stuff.
Cloudflare
Cloudflare is like a superhero shield in front of your website.
Egress Fees
Egress fees are what cloud providers charge when data leaves their network. Send a file to a user? Egress fee. Replicate to another cloud? Egress fee.
Object Storage
Object storage treats files as 'objects' — each one gets a unique key (like a URL) and is stored with its data and metadata.
S3 (Simple Storage Service)
S3 is Amazon's giant file locker in the sky.