Cloudflare puts K2 event streaming into public beta on R2 storage
Cloudflare’s new streaming service is live in beta, with pricing set and Kafka compatibility planned later.
Cloudflare has put K2, a serverless event streaming service, into public beta, and the key architectural bet is using R2 object storage as the durable log so the system can stay simple and scale compute separately from storage. Cloudflare says the design gets roughly 1 second p99 produce latency, but early beta feedback suggests end-to-end delivery can be slower, with one user reporting 2.5 seconds p95 and 7.5 seconds p99 on consumption. The company plans Kafka compatibility, but today K2 uses its own lease-based consume API, with five-minute leases and acknowledge, negative-acknowledge, and lease-extension flows. Pricing is $0.04 per GB produced and $0.04 per GB consumed, with retention billed at $0.02 per GB per month, while beta usage is free. The launch also sparked debate over whether object-storage-backed event systems can go below 100 ms latency and how expensive fan-out becomes under K2's pricing model.
Why it matters
K2 gives teams a managed stream service built around object storage rather than a traditional broker. That matters because Cloudflare is already claiming about one second to produce events, while early beta feedback shows delivery can be slower, so buyers will be watching how the service holds up under real traffic. The current lease-based consume API also means the experience is still in flux until Kafka compatibility arrives.
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Sources
- InfoQ