Cloudflare Basin: data platform exits beta with Iceberg and no egress fees

Cloudflare’s Data Platform is now generally available and has a new name: Cloudflare Basin. The company announced the change on October 1, during its Birthday Week, roughly a year after the platform was first unveiled and later opened in beta.

The rename covers three products. Cloudflare Pipelines becomes Basin Pipelines, R2 Data Catalog becomes Basin Catalog, and R2 SQL becomes Basin SQL. Together they form a serverless analytics stack built on Apache Iceberg, the open table format, and R2 Object Storage.

Basin Pipelines takes events from Workers, HTTP, or Cloudflare Logpush, transforms them with SQL, and writes them as Iceberg tables or files in R2. Basin Catalog manages Iceberg metadata and maintains tables automatically. Basin SQL is the distributed query engine that reads Iceberg tables directly on Cloudflare’s network.

What Cloudflare says the platform does

According to Cloudflare, you can create a catalog, set up a pipeline to ingest data, and query it with Basin SQL in seconds. As datasets grow, the catalog compacts metadata and data files to cut I/O and generates statistics that Basin SQL uses to split queries into smaller tasks across Workers.

The company frames openness as the point: data written to Basin can be read by any Iceberg-compatible engine, which Cloudflare lists as including PyIceberg, DuckDB, Snowflake, Spark, StarRocks, and Trino. Cloudflare says querying data across clouds, platforms, or regions carries no transfer fees, and that its own billing and infrastructure teams have used the services for e-commerce optimization, billing metrics, and infrastructure telemetry.

“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,” CTO Dane Knecht said, as reported by The Register.

The egress fee caveat

The no-egress-fee pitch comes with an exception. Cloudflare states that egressing directly from R2 through the Workers API, S3 API, and r2.dev domains is free, but connecting other metered services to an R2 bucket may incur charges from those services. The Register also notes that when Basin Pipelines loads streaming data into Iceberg or Parquet in R2, Cloudflare charges for delivering data to those sinks after an included allowance, under a pricing dimension labeled “Sinks (egress).”

Rival storage services from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft impose egress fees, The Register notes. Cloudflare’s pitch is that Iceberg-based storage in R2 avoids lock-in and lets teams move data between regions and query engines.

Cloudflare also published a customer quote from Dax Raad, co-founder of Anomaly, who said the company moved its entire data pipeline to Basin Pipelines, Catalog, and SQL, replacing an AWS S3 and Athena setup.

Basin is available now as a generally available product on Cloudflare’s Developer Platform. If you were already using the beta services under their old names, they are the same products under the new Basin branding.

Related reading

Sources

• Introducing Cloudflare Basin: an open, serverless data platform, now generally available — Cloudflare Blog
• Cloudflare launches Data Platform with bland 'Basin' branding, promise of fewer fees — The Register