Is a Cloud-hosted data pipeline right for your business?

Several years ago, I decided to move something really important to me to the Cloud: my music. 

Like many of you back in the day, I’m sure, I had several of those huge binders with the plastic sleeves inside, and they were filled to the brim with CDs. Eventually though, I got frustrated with my hoard collection.

The amount of space the CDs took up was the least of my worries. I couldn’t take them with me on trips, and it was a pain to change genres or artists in a single listening session. Supporting my favorite artists and listening to new ones had also become far too expensive. Did I really need that eighth Red Hot Chili Peppers album, and was I going to like every song on it? What if I decided I didn’t like Drake anymore the next week?

Moving my music to the Cloud and using streaming services gave me the flexibility I needed and helped me cut costs. Many companies are considering Cloud-hosted data pipelines for the first time – or adding Cloud-hosted data pipelines to their existing architecture – for the same two reasons.

Reduce costs while gaining flexibility

A Cloud-hosted data pipeline helps companies save significantly on infrastructure costs, especially when beginning their journey with observability. Deploying and maintaining onsite hardware is expensive for a startup, and it requires ongoing investment and maintenance as servers need to be replaced. Another consideration is the administrative overhead to run your own observability pipelines as a startup. If you’re a remote organization, you might even lack a physical data center in which to operate an on-premises server.  Businesses can avoid these expenses by migrating their infrastructure to the Cloud, replacing large upfront costs with a nominal operating cost, and preventing the need for expensive hardware upgrades. 

Small- to medium-sized businesses or companies implementing a data pipeline for the first time can see huge cost savings from adopting a cloud architecture. Larger companies (or those with more established set-ups) can also cut costs, typically by extending data infrastructure from on-premises only to hybrid and multi-cloud architectures.

Flexibility is also a key benefit of Cloud-hosted data pipelines. Businesses need to move enterprise data from various sources to many destinations in real time, often between on-premises and cloud environments. Leveraging the Cloud gives companies the freedom to scale easily, and enables them to use the best Cloud-based services and tools for their needs. Teams no longer need to feel the constraints of latency issues in applications where they need data now, nor worry that the sources and destinations they want to work with may not be supported by traditional data pipelines.

Rather than spend $15 for a physical CD, I could stream new music online for much less, and only buy what I liked. Plus, having my entire music collection in the Cloud gave me a ton of flexibility. It didn’t matter what genre of music I was in the mood for. I could listen to any song at any time, without being tied to my CD player. 

Managing a Cloud-hosted data pipeline

All that said, I found my music library incredibly difficult to manage on my own. My goal was to re-create the experience I got from CDs, all the way down to the printed lyrics in the booklet of each album. For me, that meant making sure I had uploaded cover art for every album and added lyrics for every song. It was exhausting managing all that data.

While adopting a Cloud-hosted data pipeline offers significant benefits in terms of savings and flexibility, it also creates challenges around managing data in different formats across different locations. What about teams who need the flexibility and cost savings of the Cloud, but don’t want the burden of operating the infrastructure needed to sustain it? To help with that, we recently introduced our SaaS offering: LogStream Cloud.

Up next: LogStream Cloud

LogStream Cloud is a hosted, distributed observability tool that provides another option for companies that need both the flexibility and cost savings of a Cloud-hosted data pipeline, but don’t want the weight of managing it.

LogStream Cloud gives you a dedicated environment that you can start using immediately, and it supports any source or destination. You can plug in sources from your data center or your cloud environment, process the data within LogStream Cloud, and then deliver the data to a cloud analytics environment, your cloud accounts, or your own data center. With LogStream Cloud, teams can easily scrape Rest APIs and get syslogs into your other SaaS tools – without having to download and run an on-premise component. You can also grab data out of Kinesis or Kafka streams, reshape it if needed, and route it to the cloud service of your choice.

The license cost of LogStream Cloud is also completely consumption-based, meaning the cost of the tool scales up or down with your business. Most importantly, because LogStream Cloud is offered as a service, we build and manage the infrastructure on your behalf. That reserves your team’s resources for doing more important things, like keeping your business running well.

The last song…

I was looking for several things when I moved my music into the Cloud. On one hand, I wanted a less expensive way to store my music that didn’t take up as much physical space. On the other hand, I needed flexibility in the music available to me at any given time – the ability to listen to whatever I wanted whenever I wanted.

Similarly, a Cloud-hosted data pipeline can help businesses cut the costs involved in building and managing the infrastructure and provide flexibility on sources, destinations, and more. If you want increased flexibility while cutting costs, a Cloud-hosted data pipeline is for you. If you want to achieve a pipeline for observability and security data without having to build and manage the infrastructure, LogStream Cloud is for you.

Interested in learning more about LogStream Cloud? Reach out to our SaaS solutions team today for more information. We’re inviting a limited number of participants, with a daily ingest of 5 TB and below. To join our beta program and shape the next version of LogStream Cloud. The service is completely free for 6 months – click here to sign up.