What are Serverless Data Pipelines?

In today’s data-driven business environment, there is a greater need for fast, reliable and up-to-date information than ever before. Critical day-to-day operations are becoming increasingly reliant on data to offer fast, efficient services to customers and deliver powerful insights.

A well-designed data pipeline ensures this information is available to the organisation when required. It pulls data from often disparate sources, cleans, merges and transforms it into a meaningful format, then has it loaded for when a customer or analyst needs it.

Previous approaches to data pipelines have been to store flat files, utilise a database or, more recently, to create a data lake full of raw data. Serverless data pipelines are the next iteration. By leveraging the benefits of a cloud-native approach, a serverless data pipeline offers simplicity, speed and cost-effectiveness at any scale.

Managing Growth

Handling massive amounts of data is not an easy task. As the volume of collected data grows, either as you expand or gather more pieces of information, the size of the data processing operation needs to match.

Managing this growth requires you to spin up more data servers. If you don’t, the alternative is to cut down on the volume of business data being processed. This can result in the loss of valuable data your business needs to make informed decisions.

The solution is a serverless approach. By utilising the near-unlimited resources of the cloud, you can dynamically grow and shrink the size of your data pipelines. This allows you to:

• Cost optimise

Fit exactly to the needs of your business, avoiding unnecessary investments in hardware and instead utilise the expertise and services of a cloud provider.

• Simplify

Working on the cloud removes many of the complications of maintaining a massive infrastructure yourself. All you need to do is set the parameters and the cloud provider handles the hardware.

• Scale

Serverless data pipelines are future-fit for a businesses’ data transformation ambitions and are ready to handle any level of demand.

Delivering Real-Time Information

Data pipelines can ultimately feed into a variety of applications: in-depth analytics software, internal reports or even customer-facing tools. Ideally, users have the most accurate and up-to-date data possible available to them.

With Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services, a range of tools are available to help you stream data in real-time into your data pipelines. Handling corruption, bottlenecks and conflicting data sources are complex problems for real-time processes, but cloud services have established and proven solutions.

Data is an invaluable resource for the modern business. Serverless data pipelines make gathering easy to manage, simple to do at scale and real-time when required.