Talk to anyone in the tech space and you’ll likely hear horror stories of how home lab setups can grow out of control or about long lists of VMs used to test various software systems. As a Criblanian I’m no exception – I have at least a half dozen instances of Cribl Stream deployed everywhere from my local machine, on docker containers, or on a few EC2 instances in AWS.

Today, I wanted to talk about Cribl.Cloud, a cloud-based deployment model available for Stream which provides more benefits than may be immediately obvious. Here are the top four reasons you should start your Stream adventure with the cloud.

1. Instantly Available

Public cloud providers may have made provisioning infrastructure easier than ever, but getting new software up and running still takes a fair amount of time and effort. If you’re looking to quickly test some features of Stream, such as Reduction or Routing, with your own data, then deploying Stream is only one component of that project. A simple question like “how much can we reduce our firewall logs using Stream” could turn into a multi-day effort.

Instead, use Stream Cloud! You can provision a tenant in seconds at Cribl.Cloud and either connect a source directly or upload a sample data file. By also using Cribl Packs, you can reduce that multi-day effort to possibly minutes.

2. Simple Transition to Production

Testing out new products can be a fun opportunity, but basic configurations and setup isn’t anybody’s idea of a fun afternoon. One of the great aspects of Stream Cloud is that it’s been designed to move to production in a seamless manner. Whether you choose to remain in the cloud, adopt a hybrid model, or move entirely on-premise, the Cribl team will ensure that none of the work put into proving the value of Stream is lost.

3. Scale As You Grow

Customers often ask me about the ongoing maintenance required to manage Stream. Naturally, they’re concerned that bringing on another product will add to a list of responsibilities that may already be a lot to handle. Cribl makes onboarding as simple as possible, but for any on-premise installation, you’ll still need people to ensure that the infrastructure hosting Stream is working properly.

One huge advantage of Stream cloud is that, as a SaaS product, you aren’t responsible for the underlying infrastructure. Cribl will ensure that your environment scales alongside you, so there is no need to provision additional hardware or manually configure auto-scaling on your own servers. Beyond that, however, having Cribl manage the infrastructure provides other less obvious benefits. For example, Cribl can automatically update your Stream environment to the latest version. Also, Cribl can more effectively manage support tickets by pulling relevant data from its environment. Or maybe you’d find benefit in easily delegating access to your Stream environment through the cloud console. Are you working with Cribl on a POV? Ask about inviting your Cribl Solutions Engineer into your environment for some hands-on keyboard assistance.

4. Get Started for Free

My favorite company value at Cribl is “Customers First, Always.” Criblanians embrace this every day and we reflect it in our products by ensuring all our resources are open and available to everyone, customer or not. With the introduction of Cribl.Cloud, we wanted to ensure that Stream was more accessible than ever before. You can get started with Stream cloud completely for free, up to 1TB per day, forever. This has been game-changing for our customers, as now anybody can test Stream to prove its value in their organization with their data, for no monetary commitment.

Stream Cloud is just the beginning. Offering more products as cloud services is a key goal for Cribl over the coming years. If you’re interested in testing it out, navigate to Cribl.Cloud to sign up. You can also test features in our sandboxes.  If you have any questions, please consider joining our community. Reach out if there is anything we can do to help!

The fastest way to get started with Cribl Stream is to sign-up at Cribl.Cloud. You can process up to 1 TB of throughput per day at no cost. Sign-up and start using Stream within a few minutes.