Storage & CDN

This layer stores and delivers user uploads, asset bundles, data exports, and static documents across edge nodes around the world. First decide whether standard object storage like Cloudflare R2 with S3-compatible APIs meets your needs, or whether you need automatic on-the-fly image transforms and video transcoding. Object storage keeps unstructured files cheap to store, without high egress fees. A serious mistake is saving user uploads on a local application server's disk or putting binary blobs into database tables. That blocks horizontal scaling, creates single points of failure, and makes server backups grow out of control.