Cloudflare is expanding deeper into the data business with Basin, a new serverless platform designed to collect, store, and analyze large amounts of information without forcing developers to manage dedicated infrastructure.
The pitch is fairly straightforward. Cloudflare says Basin can replace some of the complicated plumbing behind modern analytics stacks while keeping data in an open format. More importantly, the company says customers won’t have to pay egress fees when moving that data between clouds, platforms, or regions.
That last part could make Basin particularly interesting for companies tired of watching cloud bills climb simply because they need to move their own data around.
Basin uses Apache Iceberg, an open table format increasingly used for large analytical datasets, alongside Cloudflare R2 object storage. Because the information stays in the Iceberg format, compatible tools can access it directly without requiring customers to first copy or convert the data into a proprietary format.
Cloudflare is essentially arguing that developers shouldn’t need a dedicated data engineering operation just to collect information and ask questions about it.
“Developers shouldn’t need to become data infrastructure operators just to answer questions from their own data,” said Dane Knecht, CTO at Cloudflare. “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.”
Basin handles ingestion, storage, cataloging, and SQL queries on Cloudflare’s network. There are no servers or clusters for customers to provision ahead of time, with resources instead available on demand.
Cloudflare is also taking an obvious shot at the traditional hyperscaler model, particularly when it comes to data transfer costs.
Anomaly, the company behind open source AI coding agent OpenCode, says it has already moved its data pipeline to Basin. According to co-founder Dax Raad, the company replaced an Amazon Web Services setup built around S3 and Athena.
“We moved our entire company’s data pipeline to Basin Pipelines, Catalog, and SQL,” said Raad. “We replaced a complex AWS S3 and Athena setup with a cleaner, serverless architecture that reliably handles all of our event data.”
That is probably one of the more interesting real-world examples Cloudflare could provide. AWS S3 and Athena are well-established services, so convincing companies to replace that combination would give Basin considerably more credibility than simply attracting brand-new workloads.
The open nature of the platform could also prove important. Cloudflare says customers retain control over their data because Apache Iceberg isn’t tied exclusively to Basin. In theory, organizations could use other Iceberg-compatible tools without first migrating everything into another storage format.
Of course, using an open format doesn’t magically eliminate vendor dependence. Companies building infrastructure around Cloudflare’s network and services could still find themselves invested in the broader Cloudflare ecosystem. Developers will have to decide whether Basin actually makes moving between platforms easier in practice.
Still, eliminating egress fees while offering serverless analytics makes Basin worth watching. Cloudflare has already used R2’s zero-egress model to challenge one of the cloud industry’s more frustrating pricing practices. Basin now extends that argument from simply storing data to actually doing something useful with it.
Cloudflare Basin is generally available starting today.
Support independent tech journalism
NERDS.xyz is independently owned and operated. If you enjoy my coverage of Linux, AI, hardware, cybersecurity, and tech culture, consider supporting the site on Ko-fi.
Support NERDS.xyz
