Storage

What Are Cloud Storage APIs?

Cloud storage APIs provide the infrastructure for persisting and delivering files in modern applications — profile photos, product images, documents, videos, audio files, and any binary asset your application creates or accepts from users. Unlike a database that stores structured rows and columns, object storage holds arbitrary files as blobs identified by keys, with public or private access controls and CDN delivery at the edge. The right storage API choice depends on your primary use case: raw object storage, media transformation, or developer-friendly file management with auth integration.

What Developers Store and Deliver

• User-uploaded profile pictures and avatars served via CDN with automatic resizing
• Product catalog images with on-the-fly transformation (crop, resize, format conversion to WebP/AVIF)
• Video files for streaming with progressive delivery and adaptive bitrate support
• Document uploads (PDFs, spreadsheets) stored with signed URLs for time-limited secure access
• Application backups and database exports retained with configurable lifecycle policies
• AI-generated images and files produced by model inference pipelines

Choosing a Storage Provider

AWS S3 is the de facto standard — 99.999999999% (11 nines) durability, S3-compatible API adopted by all alternatives, and free for the first 5GB. Cloudflare R2 offers S3-compatible storage with zero egress fees — a major cost saving for high-traffic media delivery. Cloudinary is the go-to for media management — automatic image and video transformation, CDN, and AI-powered features like background removal and smart cropping. Supabase Storage bundles file storage with auth-aware access policies into the Supabase platform. Uploadcare provides a complete file upload widget, storage, and CDN in one integration, minimising frontend work.