Sledhouse: The First Data Product Lakehouse

Sledhouse is Bobsled's cutting-edge data product lakehouse, designed to transform how data providers create, fulfill and govern data products. Built on a multi-cloud, zero-copy architecture, Sledhouse offers fine-grained product customization and fulfillment at a fraction of the cost and complexity of traditional data feeds. Leading data companies like Dun & Bradstreet, CoreLogic, ZoomInfo and Deutsche Börse rely on Bobsled to deliver the right data to the right customers where they want it — all while dramatically reducing the infrastructure and labor costs traditionally required to maintain data feeds.

Sledhouse is architected to radically reduce the cost of managing and supporting the end-to-end data fulfillment workflow while maintaining the flexibility and security modern data businesses require. By replacing disparate data stores and pipelines with a single, globally interoperable data product lakehouse, data providers can accelerate customers' time-to-insight while reducing the incremental cost of fulfillment.

Why data providers need a data product lakehouse

The emergence of data feeds as one of the three pillars of data monetization — alongside SaaS apps and APIs — means data companies now need the security, scalability and reliability offered by commercially-built infrastructure. Sledhouse dramatically simplifies the fulfillment process for analytical data by providing a single platform to streamline the creation, fulfillment and governance of data products no matter where they are being consumed.

Bobsled offers a powerful suite of features that free up engineering teams and empower product, sales and operations to deliver better experiences to customers:

• Zero-copy architecture. Customize and fulfill data products directly to customers without replicating data. Sledhouse's zero-copy fulfillment engine leverages the growing adoption of open table formats to enable highly performant, egress-free fulfillment of data products directly to a customer's cloud platform (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks).
• Egress-free infrastructure. Sledhouse is built on an egress-free, S3-compliant data lake, so you only pay egress once for every data product.
• Global fulfillment. Securely deliver analytics-ready data products to customers in the platforms where they work from a single platform — with support for FTP, cloud storage and native cloud data warehouse sharing, and no pipelines, credentials or accounts to manage.
• Streamlined entitlements. Empower operations and sales teams to configure the columns and rows to share with customers, and pre-configure common slices or customize based on customer needs — all without creating a ticket.
• Unified governance. Easily track usage and entitlements across every customer, get alerts when deliveries fail, explore user behavior with telemetry, and audit lineage even for customized products.

Ingestion and table maintenance

Sledhouse uses Spark-based Ingestion and Table Maintenance engines to seamlessly and cost-efficiently maintain Iceberg-based versions of a provider's data assets.

• Ingestion replicates data to Iceberg in R2 using multiple approaches depending on the use case, supporting both incremental updates and full overwrites.
• Table maintenance manages background jobs to compact, update and delete data, ensuring optimal performance and data integrity.

Sledhouse employs Apache Iceberg as its open table format, providing interoperability across data platforms. Iceberg is ACID-compliant, optimized for large-scale data processing, and offers snapshot, time-travel and rollback features that enhance data versioning and recovery.

An interoperable data lake, without the egress bill

Sledhouse's interoperable data lake enables teams to store data products in a format that supports cross-platform fulfillment with minimal infrastructure costs. All data in Sledhouse is stored in Cloudflare's egress-free storage, R2 — dramatically reducing one of the major cost drivers for both zero-copy and distributed multi-cloud fulfillment. That means: elimination of data transfer egress fees, a global distribution network ensuring low-latency access for users worldwide across data platforms, and an S3-compatible API that integrates seamlessly with existing tools and workflows.

Zero-copy fulfillment

Sledhouse is the first commercial platform to offer cross-platform zero-copy fulfillment. With zero-copy fulfillment, Bobsled uses external tables to generate logical views of Iceberg tables for customers natively within their cloud data warehouses — with no incremental storage or egress fees, no replica datasets to maintain, and performant queries thanks to native support for Iceberg across the major cloud data warehouses.

Here is the data flow when sharing data via Sledhouse's zero-copy path, encrypted in motion and at rest throughout:

1. Data is incrementally replicated from the source platform (e.g., Google BigQuery, Snowflake) using multiple replication patterns into Iceberg tables in R2.
2. Iceberg tables are created and managed by a Spark-based Table Maintenance service.
3. External tables are set up in destination platforms on top of the Iceberg tables.
4. Data product views are created on top of the external tables and added to shares or listings.
5. Data consumers are granted access to those data shares or listings.
6. Consumer queries in destination platforms (e.g., Snowflake) are served directly from the Iceberg tables in R2.

A distribution network and managed sharing infrastructure

Sledhouse also offers the ability to localize data within the platform or region of a customer, improving query performance for data warehouse destinations. In most cases, data is replicated within single-tenant staging accounts managed by Bobsled — delivering improved query performance alongside egress-free replication.

Sledhouse permissions data products to customers using a network of fully-managed, single-tenant cloud accounts. These accounts enable Sledhouse to permission products using the native sharing protocols of each platform, so customers receive data as a "data share" accessible with no ETL. Access is managed through fine-grained data product views, and integration into Iceberg tables happens via external tables and views in each data warehouse.

Data product catalog and global fulfillment engine

The Data Product Catalog is where users create and manage data products. Teams can generate logical views of core tables stored in the data lake, and fulfillment teams can further customize products on a per-customer basis — with zero-copy data product creation and management, UI- and API-based customization, and detailed lineage for every product fulfilled to customers.

The Global Fulfillment Engine powers fulfillment within Sledhouse to every supported destination — cloud data warehouses, cloud storage and FTP — offering zero-copy fulfillment (in select locations) and localized fulfillment via Bobsled's first-of-its-kind distribution network.

To streamline operations and enhance the user experience, Sledhouse also offers an intuitive UI and comprehensive REST API for high-level, declarative configuration of Sledhouse tables and data products, plus streamlined workflows for data product creation and distribution.

Security and compliance

Bobsled is trusted by the world's largest data companies to power fulfillment of their most sensitive data.

• SOC 2 & ISO 27001 certified. As an infrastructure company, security is in Bobsled's DNA.
• GDPR & CCPA compliant. Bobsled offers a standardized solution for DSAR and consent requirements.
• Secure, single-tenant architecture. All data in Bobsled is processed through single-tenant environments, isolated and owned by each customer.
• Encryption in motion and at rest. Data in Bobsled is encrypted throughout the entire platform.

Why data providers choose Sledhouse

Engineering teams at companies like Dun & Bradstreet, CoreLogic, Deutsche Börse and ZoomInfo rely on Bobsled because it improves the customer experience while reducing costs.

• Speed up sales cycles. Get prospects and customers querying your data and discovering insight in minutes, no matter where they work.
• Eliminate engineering burden. Empower non-technical teams to get customers up and running on the data they want, without engineering support.
• Drive down cloud costs. Radically reduce the storage, egress and compute costs required to customize and fulfill data in the cloud.

This robust technical foundation enables Sledhouse to revolutionize data sharing and product management — enabling on-demand data product customization, global fulfillment and unified governance across every customer, with limited technical support required.