Storage Release Notes

R2 Data Catalog now supports automatic snapshot expiration for Apache Iceberg tables

In Apache Iceberg, a snapshot is metadata that represents the state of a table at a given point in time. Every mutation creates a new snapshot which enable powerful features like time travel queries and rollback capabilities but will accumulate over time.

Without regular cleanup, these accumulated snapshots can lead to:

• Metadata overhead
• Slower table operations
• Increased storage costs.

Snapshot expiration in R2 Data Catalog automatically removes old table snapshots based on your configured retention policy, improving performance and storage costs.

Snapshot expiration uses two parameters to determine which snapshots to remove:

• --older-than-days: age threshold in days
• --retain-last: minimum snapshot count to retain

Both conditions must be met before a snapshot is expired, ensuring you always retain recent snapshots even if they exceed the age threshold.

This feature complements automatic compaction, which optimizes query performance by combining small data files into larger ones. Together, these automatic maintenance operations keep your Iceberg tables performant and cost-efficient without manual intervention.

To learn more about snapshot expiration and how to configure it, visit our table maintenance documentation or see how to manage catalogs.

Rules of Durable Objects guide

A new Rules of Durable Objects guide is now available, providing opinionated best practices for building effective Durable Objects applications. This guide covers design patterns, storage strategies, concurrency, and common anti-patterns to avoid.

Key guidance includes:

• Design around your "atom" of coordination — Create one Durable Object per logical unit (chat room, game session, user) instead of a global singleton that becomes a bottleneck.
• Use SQLite storage with RPC methods — SQLite-backed Durable Objects with typed RPC methods provide the best developer experience and performance.
• Understand input and output gates — Learn how Cloudflare's runtime prevents data races by default, how write coalescing works, and when to use blockConcurrencyWhile().
• Leverage Hibernatable WebSockets — Reduce costs for real-time applications by allowing Durable Objects to sleep while maintaining WebSocket connections.

The testing documentation has also been updated with modern patterns using @cloudflare/vitest-pool-workers, including examples for testing SQLite storage, alarms, and direct instance access:

Storage billing for SQLite-backed Durable Objects will be enabled in January 2026, with a target date of January 7, 2026 (no earlier).

To view your SQLite storage usage, go to the Durable Objects page

Go to Durable Objects

If you do not want to incur costs, please take action such as optimizing queries or deleting unnecessary stored data in order to reduce your SQLite storage usage ahead of the January 7th target. Only usage on and after the billing target date will incur charges.

Developers on the Workers Paid plan with Durable Object's SQLite storage usage beyond included limits will incur charges according to SQLite storage pricing announced in September 2024 with the public beta. Developers on the Workers Free plan will not be charged.

Compute billing for SQLite-backed Durable Objects has been enabled since the initial public beta. SQLite-backed Durable Objects currently incur charges for requests and duration, and no changes are being made to compute billing.

For more information about SQLite storage pricing and limits, refer to the Durable Objects pricing documentation.

Containers now support mounting R2 buckets as FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) volumes

Containers now support mounting R2 buckets as FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) volumes, allowing applications to interact with R2 using standard filesystem operations.

Common use cases include:

• Bootstrapping containers with datasets, models, or dependencies for sandboxes and agent environments
• Persisting user configuration or application state without managing downloads
• Accessing large static files without bloating container images or downloading at startup

FUSE adapters like tigrisfs, s3fs, and gcsfuse can be installed in your container image and configured to mount buckets at startup.

See the Mount R2 buckets with FUSE example for a complete guide on mounting R2 buckets and/or other S3-compatible storage buckets within your containers.

Go to Durable Objects

You can now view and write to each Durable Object's storage using a UI editor on the Cloudflare dashboard. Only Durable Objects using SQLite storage can use Data Studio.

Data Studio

Data Studio unlocks easier data access with Durable Objects for prototyping application data models to debugging production storage usage. Before, querying your Durable Objects data required deploying a Worker.

To access a Durable Object, you can provide an object's unique name or ID generated by Cloudflare. Data Studio requires you to have at least the Workers Platform Admin role, and all queries are captured with audit logging for your security and compliance needs. Queries executed by Data Studio send requests to your remote, deployed objects and incur normal usage billing.

To learn more, visit the Data Studio documentation. If you have feedback or suggestions for the new Data Studio, please share your experience on Discord ↗

You can now enable automatic compaction for Apache Iceberg ↗ tables in R2 Data Catalog to improve query performance

Compaction is the process of taking a group of small files and combining them into fewer larger files. This is an important maintenance operation as it helps ensure that query performance remains consistent by reducing the number of files that needs to be scanned.

To enable automatic compaction in R2 Data Catalog, find it under R2 Data Catalog in your R2 bucket settings in the dashboard.

Or with Wrangler, run:

To get started with compaction, check out manage catalogs. For best practices and limitations, refer to about compaction.