Cloudflare launches Data Platform with bland 'Basin' branding, promise of fewer fees

Cloudflare Data Platform on Thursday received a bland new brand name, Basin, and promotion from beta status to general availability. Under the tub-themed moniker, Cloudflare Pipelines, R2 Data Catalog, and R2 SQL become Basin Pipelines, Basin Catalog, and Basin SQL respectively.

The company's evocation of washroom fixtures doesn't quite align with its stable of more literal product names – Sandboxes, Workers, Email Services, and so on. But given that the occasion is Cloudflare Birthday Week, which itself fails to respect the concept of "day," straightforward naming may be expecting too much.

At least Cloudflare didn't latch onto any of the worse water storage metaphors for collections of information, like data lake, lagoon, puddle, bowl, or cesspool. "Sink" was also on this list, but it turns out Cloudflare has already deployed the term, as we'll see below.

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Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht pitched the renamed platform as an easier alternative to standing up a bunch of hardware for observing data. 

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"With Cloudflare Basin, we are bringing the same serverless model that developers expect from Cloudflare to analytics: no clusters to manage, no unnecessary data movement, and open standards that keep customers in control of their data," he said.

Basin's appeal is based on lack of lock-in – because it relies on Apache Iceberg – and lack of egress fees, so data can move freely across cloud regions. Rival services from hyperscalers (Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Azure Blob Storage) impose egress fees.

Cloudflare Basin represents an invitation for companies to store data in R2 Data Catalog and then process it with Basin SQL or any of various external query engines like DuckDB, PyIceberg, Snowflake, Spark, StarRocks, or Trino.

And that's what Cloudflare is highlighting in its menu of canned customer quotes. Here's Julien Grobbelaar, head of platform at Bobsled: "Basin allows us to build data products that can be made accessible in any region of every major data and AI platform, all at production-grade reliability and a fraction of the cost thanks to zero egress fees."

Cloudflare claims as much: "Querying data using tools from different clouds, platforms, or regions carries no transfer fees."

And yet there are fees. As Cloudflare explains, "Egressing directly from R2, including via the Workers API, S3 API, and r2.dev domains does not incur data transfer (egress) charges and is free. If you connect other metered services to an R2 bucket, you may be charged by those services."

If Basin Pipelines is used to load streaming data into Apache Iceberg or Parquet in R2, Cloudflare charges for delivering data to those sinks after the included allowance. Cloudflare labels this pricing dimension "Sinks (egress)."

At the bottom of every data lake, sink, pool, or basin, there's a drain for cash. ®