2026 Data Lake Benchmark: AWS S3 vs Cloudflare R2 vs Google Cloud Storage Read/Write Speed Data lakes in 2026 handle petabyte-scale datasets with mixed workloads: high-throughput sequential reads for analytics, low-latency random reads for real-time queries, and bulk writes for ingestion. This benchmark tests read/write performance of three leading object storage providers under realistic 2026 data lake workloads. Test Methodology All tests ran across 7 days in January 2026, using the s5cmd (v2.2.0) and gsutil (v5.27) CLI tools, with the fio (v3.37) benchmark tool for low-level I/O testing. We tested two AWS regions (us-east-1, eu-west-1), two Cloudflare R2 regions (us-east-1, eu-west-1), and two GCS regions (us-central1, europe-west1) to eliminate regional variance.…