The world of enterprise software, SaaS, and cloud platforms has gone through a Cambrian explosion in the last half-decade, as the number of solutions available nearly doubles every two to three years. Meanwhile, the locus for decision-making has been pushed deeper into the organization, and the number of constituents impacted by each decision has also increased when choosing the right software vendor for the use case.

Companies are considering switching from Amazon S3 because of: Amazon S3 is seen as the safest choice due to the native integrations, but as object storage has become used for anything from being a cloud data lake, to storing thumbnails for blog posts, Amazon S3 can't be best-in-class in everything. The question remains, is making the switch worth it, and to whom should you switch? ‍

Twilio -- what? Sendgrid -- who? It can be an overwhelming choice with the multitude of SMS API services now available. Today, we’ll go in-depth into what an SMS API is, its benefits over email communication, and the key questions you’ll want to consider before choosing an SMS platform.

At Taloflow, we depend on AWS, and so do many of our customers. If AWS is down, we've got to know! Unfortunately, the official AWS status site is a bit vague on details, and popular downtime detectors are just not suited for this purpose.

It's too difficult for product teams to find the right vendors. Vendors obscure details, promise everything or downright lie, have special pricing for those who know how to ask, and there are just too many of them! This problem is getting worse because of the "Cambrian explosion" in cloud tooling, a blossoming in the number of solutions and niche specializations.

Building serverless applications on the “edge” is becoming a reality. The promise of fast execution and seamless deployment is near, but is it here? The goal: Use an edge platform to build a proof of concept clone of linkz.ai, a tooltip generator for external links (among other things).

Cloudflare just announced Cloudflare R2, a cloud object storage service with some incredible features. Keep in mind, it is currently in early access so we don’t know everything yet. Cloudflare R2 promises to solve three main problems that make incumbent providers like Amazon S3 more complicated: It also offers a supposedly easy migration from S3-compatible storage buckets, and automatic replication of “blobs” across the world. In this post, I’m going to cover the following: ‍

Cloudflare R2 is a new cloud object storage provider with an eye towards stealing market share from Amazon S3 by offering cheaper object storage that is S3-compatible. This value proposition resonates with many developers because Amazon S3, while powerful and deeply embedded with the rest of the AWS ecosystem, is expensive to use. AWS has also not made any price reductions for Amazon S3 since 2016, whereas some of its other staple services have seen significant price reductions.

Artificial intelligence (AI) drives innovations across all facets of our lives, from self-driving cars to email spam filtering to personalized shopping to smart homes and automated investing. There's no denying that these critical innovations wouldn’t have been possible without today’s businesses’ impressive data gathering capabilities. But perhaps more important is the ability to train AI tools using the data.

At Taloflow we recently launched a way for companies migrating from AWS/GCP/Azure to 3rd party object storage providers like Storj to receive an objective TCO analysis of all the switching and storing costs associated. But what exactly is object storage - and how does it compare to block storage? For both, we will cover the technical description, benefits, and application use-cases.