Cloudflare R2 best practices

Use when building or reviewing integrations with Cloudflare R2.

Mental model

• R2 is S3-compatible object storage optimized for internet-facing access patterns and no-egress-fee architectures.
• Treat R2 as object storage, not as a filesystem or database.
• Choose access mode intentionally: Workers binding, S3-compatible API, CLI, or dashboard.

Access path selection

• Use Workers bindings when the application already runs on Cloudflare Workers and needs low-friction server-side reads or writes.
• Use the S3-compatible API when you want standard S3 SDKs or existing application code to talk to R2.
• Keep the chosen access method consistent within a service unless you have a strong reason to mix them.

Bucket and object design