There is one major reason S3 remains the king of storage for mobile media uploads: bucket notifications. Does R2 implement this feature? If so, I’m going to have to run some experiments with this...
To be honest, I think the biggest draw will be for companies (like where I work) that put large objects on S3 and distribute it to hundreds / thousands / millions of customers. The egress direct from S3 is on the order of 8 cents a GB, and with Cloudfront in front of it it’s a few cents lower, and you can negotiate pricing a little lower if you’re big enough. But not an order of magnitude.
We’d stick R2 in front of an S3 bucket and wipe off a the biggest portion of our bill.
S3 does absolutely have a ton of other stuff like events, lifecycle, Glacier, Lambda etc and is plugged into the AWS ecosystem, so I doubt we’re exiting it completely. But this is a solid option as a front for egress from S3.
We're fully integrated with Workers, so you can write a Worker that calls additional logic when a request is made to the bucket's url.
We have notifications, where a change to the bucket invokes a worker with a specific event, on our roadmap, but have a bunch of other work prioritized ahead of them.
I know this is irrational and not very helpful, but it actually makes me angry when I see a response like "but you can cobble together some janky custom code with Workers to do what you want".
It's like going to a restaurant, asking if they have shrimp scampi, and getting a reply that you can go to a supermarket and buy the ingredients and make the dish and bring it back to the restaurant to have with your meal.
Hi Greg, thanks for the feedback. It’d be great if you could get around to putting up an example of how to do bucket notifications + lifecycle using Workers as a temporary workaround until it’s part of the “core.” I don’t think I’m the only person with this use case, but maybe I’m more of an edge-case minority than I imagine... In any case, a code library / “recipe collection” (do we still call them cookbooks?) would be great when this launches.
We’d stick R2 in front of an S3 bucket and wipe off a the biggest portion of our bill.
S3 does absolutely have a ton of other stuff like events, lifecycle, Glacier, Lambda etc and is plugged into the AWS ecosystem, so I doubt we’re exiting it completely. But this is a solid option as a front for egress from S3.