During the recent Developer Week, Cloudflare announced that the object storage R2 now supports event notifications, which automatically trigger Workers in response to data changes. Additionally, the migration service Super Slurper now extends its support to Google Cloud Storage and a new infrequent access storage tier is available in private beta.
Presently in open beta, event notifications dispatch messages to a queue whenever there's a change to data within a bucket. These messages are subsequently received by a consumer Worker, allowing developers to define any subsequent actions needed. Matt DeBoard, Mengqi Chen, Siddhant Sinha, systems engineers at Cloudflare, and Erin Thames, product designer at Cloudflare, write:
The lifecycle of data often doesn’t stop immediately after upload to an R2 bucket – event data may need to be transformed and loaded into a data warehouse, media files may need to go through a post-processing step, etc. We’re releasing event notifications for R2 in open beta to enable building applications and workflows driven by your changing data.
Source: Cloudflare blog
Designed for data lakes, storage for cloud-native applications, and web content, Cloudflare R2 enables developers to store unstructured data using S3-like APIs. Dubbed the ‘zero egress fee object storage platform’ by Cloudflare to emphasize its main differentiator from competing globally distributed object storage services, R2 offers dynamic functionalities that integrate with Cloudflare Workers.
Initially released last year with support exclusively for Amazon S3, Super Slurper is a migration service that enables developers to transfer their data to R2 either in one comprehensive transfer or gradually. The service now extends its compatibility to Google Cloud Storage as a source. Migration jobs preserve custom object metadata from the source bucket by replicating them onto the migrated objects in R2.
The private beta release of the Infrequent Access storage class, a cost-effective option with comparable performance and durability, marked the third feature announcement for R2 during Developer Week. This new storage class can be assigned either through APIs or lifecycle policies and is tailored for scenarios involving infrequently accessed data, such as long-tail user-generated content or logs. DeBoard, Chen, Sinha, and Thames add:
In the future, we plan to automatically optimize storage classes for data so you can avoid manually creating rules and better adapt to changing data access patterns.
On Hacker News, user thrixton questions the pricing of the new tier:
So pricing is 1c / GB-month, compared to S3 IA at 1.25c / GB-month, a decent saving but not massive, no archive or deep archive options though, I wonder if / when these will come. What sort of negotiated rates can you get from AWS for bandwidth I wonder, at the moment, that seems like the only real benefit from CF I think.
While the Infrequent Access storage class does not incur egress fees, a data retrieval fee of USD 0.01/GB (equivalent to AWS S3-IA) is charged when data within this tier is retrieved.