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