Digital Signage Storage Architecture: Cloudflare R2 vs AWS S3 vs EC2

Introduction

Digital signage fleets push heavy media (images/video) to thousands of players. The storage architecture you choose determines your cost curve and operational risk. This decision compares Cloudflare R2, AWS S3, and an EC2-origin pattern through the lens of pricing (2024–2025), durability, CDN fit, and day-2 operations.

📋 Context

• Global players with high cacheability and periodic content refresh
• CDN in front of origin is assumed
• Measured by $/GB-month, $/GB egress, request/ops pricing, and operational overhead

For Comparison: Options Deep Dive

Option A — Cloudflare R2 (Object Storage)

Strengths:

• Zero egress fees from R2 (pair naturally with Cloudflare CDN). Storage ~$0.015/GB-month; reads/writes billed as Class B/A ops. (Cloudflare)
• 11×9 durability; S3-compatible API. (Cloudflare Docs) Trade-offs:
• Pay per read operation (Class B) which matters for many small objects; plan for request coalescing and CDN caching. (Reddit)
• Feature depth (analytics, event notifications) differs from S3 ecosystem.

Option B — AWS S3 (Object Storage)

Strengths:

• Mature ecosystem, S3→CloudFront origin fetch $0; S3 Standard ~$0.023/GB-month (us-east-1 representative). (Amazon Web Services, Inc.)
• 11×9 durability, 99.99% availability design target; broad tooling (Lifecycle, Replication, EventBridge). (AWS Documentation) Trade-offs:
• Internet egress billed via CloudFront DTO tiers; request pricing can dominate for image-heavy playlists.

Option C — EC2-origin (Compute + Block Storage)

Strengths:

• Full control: custom authentication, on-the-fly transcodes, watermarking at origin. Trade-offs:
• You pay EC2 hours + EBS (~$0.08/GB-month gp3) + internet egress tiers (first 10TB ≈ $0.09/GB). Ops overhead: patching, autoscaling, failover, IPv4 address charges (since 2024). (Cloudchipr)

For Analysis: Deep Exploration

Durability & Availability

• R2 and S3 both publish 99.999999999% durability. S3 Standard targets 99.99% availability; R2 enterprise SLO cites 99.9% monthly uptime. For signage, the CDN masks short origin blips, but long outages affect cache misses and refreshes. (Cloudflare Docs)

CDN Coupling & Egress

• R2: no egress fees from origin simplify budgeting; you still pay Cloudflare CDN rates for delivery. S3: S3→CloudFront fetch is $0; you pay CloudFront egress and requests to viewers. EC2-origin: standard AWS internet DTO tiers apply from EC2 if you bypass CloudFront or use multi-CDN; with CloudFront, origin fetch from EC2 is also $0 DTO but you still run servers. (Cloudflare)

Requests/Operations

• R2: Class B (reads) ≈ $0.36 per million; Class A (mutations) ≈ $4.50 per million. S3: per-1k GET/PUT pricing varies by class/region. EC2: no per-object op costs, but load balancer/L7 costs + instance CPU. For signage, optimize for larger bundles and high CDN hit ratio. (Cloudflare)

Costed Scenario (Realistic)

Assumptions: 2,000 players, avg 3 GB updates/player/month (images+few videos) = 6 TB/month delivered; 95% CDN hit ratio; origin bytes = 5% = 300 GB/month; object count ~1.2M GETs/day.

• R2 (origin): Storage 5 TB @ $0.015 ≈ $75/mo; Reads: say 36M Class B/mo ≈ $12.96; Mutations 2M Class A ≈ $9.00; Egress: $0 (origin). CDN delivery billed separately. (Cloudflare)
• S3 (origin): Storage 5 TB @ $0.023 ≈ $115/mo; S3→CloudFront origin fetch $0; S3 request charges apply per 1k GET/PUT; viewer egress billed in CloudFront. (AWS Documentation)
• EC2-origin: Two m7g.large in ASG (price not modeled here), EBS 5 TB gp3 @ ~$0.08/GB-mo ≈ $400/mo storage; origin egress to CloudFront $0; to internet (multi-CDN) follows EC2 DTO tiers (first 10TB ≈ $0.09/GB). Ops overhead non-trivial. (Cloudchipr)

Implication: With high CDN hit ratios, origin egress is small but not zero. R2’s $0 egress simplifies multi-CDN or direct-from-origin edge cases. S3 integrates best if you are AWS-centric and already standardized on CloudFront.

For News: Event Analysis (Pricing updates 2024–2025)

• AWS introduced/clarified free S3→CloudFront DTO ($0). EC2 and other services share the standard internet egress tiers (first 10TB @ ~$0.09/GB in many regions). Cloudflare R2 emphasizes zero egress in 2025 docs and adds storage classes (Standard/IA). (Amazon Web Services, Inc.)

Decision Framework (for comparison type)

Recommendation by scenario

• Cloudflare stack / multi-CDN / unpredictable egress → R2
• AWS-native stack / IaC & observability on AWS → S3 + CloudFront
• Custom origin logic or specialized transforms → EC2-origin, fronted by CloudFront

Practical Guidance

When to use:

• R2 when your fleet is on Cloudflare CDN or you plan multi-CDN; you want predictable bills and can tune for Class B ops.
• S3 when most infra is in AWS; you’ll front with CloudFront and leverage native tools (Lifecycle, Replication, events).
• EC2-origin for custom per-request logic or legacy apps requiring POSIX access.

Common Pitfalls:

• Underestimating request/operation costs on object stores (batch small images; use manifests; increase cache TTLs). (Cloudflare)
• Ignoring origin availability: even with CDN, purge waves and cold caches hit origin hard—use rate limiting and staggered invalidations.
• Forgetting IPv4/EIP charges on EC2 and DTO tiers when bypassing CloudFront. (Cloudchipr)

Real-World Example

A retail network (1,500 screens) updates a 2.5 GB media pack weekly (≈150 TB/yr delivered). With a 96% CDN hit ratio and multi-region players:

• R2+Cloudflare: $0 egress from origin; storage and Class B dominate; costs scale cleanly with object count.
• S3+CloudFront: S3 storage + request + CloudFront DTO; origin fetches free; good CloudWatch/athena visibility.
• EC2-origin+CloudFront: workable but ops-heavy; pays for servers 24/7; failover adds complexity. Choose only if you need on-origin dynamic transforms.

Conclusion

For digital signage, default to object storage + CDN. Choose Cloudflare R2 for zero-egress simplicity and multi-CDN agility. Choose AWS S3 if you are AWS-centric and will use CloudFront (origin fetch $0). Keep EC2-origin for edge cases requiring bespoke origin logic.

Next steps:

1. Estimate monthly origin bytes (post-CDN) and object counts.
2. Run both providers’ calculators with your cache policies.
3. Pilot in one region with synthetic cache-busts to validate request/egress assumptions.