A comparison of object storage systems on AWS and Cloudflare, by Sylvain Kerkour. Let’s go straight to the punchline.
Honestly, I see only a few reasons to use S3 today: if ~40ms of latency really matters, if you already have a mature AWS-only architecture and inter-region traffic fees are not making a dent in your profits, or if it’s really hard to bring another vendor into your infrastructure for organizational reasons. That’s all.
Maybe 90%+ of projects and organizations will be better served by Cloudflare R2.
Trust but verify on that one. However, it’s nice that there are multiple object storage options. In addition to R2, Backblaze runs B2, Akamai/Linode has its own object storage, ditto Digital Ocean Spaces, Vultr object storage, etc.
I suspect that the offerings of the smaller players are best thought of as internal S3 substitutes for building within those environments, rather than globally facing S3 endpoints. YMMV.