Pipeline Setup

Discovery & Scoping

Every DataBridge engagement starts with a direct engineering conversation — not a sales call with a slide deck. Our team has built and operated these pipelines in production across robotics labs, film studios, drone operations, and scientific research facilities. We learn the specifics of your operation: how many capture devices you run per day, what storage media types you use (SD cards, HDDs, SSDs, CFexpress, NVMe drives), where your datacenter is located, which cloud provider and region you target (AWS us-east-1, ap-south-1, GCP europe-west1, Azure westus2), your compliance and data retention requirements, and your target throughput in terabytes per day.

The output of the scoping call is a concrete system design document — not a proposal template. It specifies the number of ingest servers, the hardware configuration per server, the network topology including Direct Connect or Interconnect circuit sizing, the software deployment plan, the labeling workflow for field teams, and the monitoring architecture. This document becomes the engineering blueprint for everything that follows. For teams working with egocentric capture data, multimodal training datasets, or high-volume drone imagery, we also map out the data lineage requirements — how every file traces back to its capture event, operator, and GPS coordinates.

Hardware Specification

Based on the scoping output, we design custom server specifications matched to your throughput requirements. Each ingest server is purpose-built for sustained high-throughput data movement: 5-bay USB 3.2 Gen 2 hubs providing 10 Gbps per port for parallel device connections, dual 2 TB NVMe SSDs in RAID 0 for a 4 TB high-speed buffer (sequential writes exceeding 5 GB/s), dual 10GbE or 25GbE NICs (Intel X710 or Mellanox ConnectX-4) with failover for network redundancy, 64 GB DDR5 ECC memory for reliability under sustained load, and IPMI/BMC for lights-out remote management.

We handle the full hardware lifecycle: procurement from tier-1 vendors, assembly in our staging facility, 72-hour burn-in testing under sustained I/O load to catch infant mortality failures, firmware updates, OS installation (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS headless), network interface configuration, and physical labeling with asset tags. Servers ship pre-configured in 2U rackmount chassis with redundant power supplies. When the rack arrives at your datacenter — whether that is in Mumbai, Tokyo, Frankfurt, or Virginia — your team plugs in power and Ethernet, and the server is live.

Direct Line Setup

Data never touches the public internet. We set up a dedicated private network connection between your datacenter and your cloud provider — AWS Direct Connect, Google Cloud Interconnect, or Azure ExpressRoute. This provides consistent, predictable throughput (1 Gbps to 100 Gbps depending on your circuit), sub-millisecond latency compared to internet-based transfers, and complete isolation from public traffic. For deployments targeting AWS S3, we configure the virtual interface, establish BGP peering with your VPC, and set up a Gateway VPC endpoint so S3 traffic stays entirely within the AWS backbone.

Circuit provisioning typically takes 2-4 weeks depending on the provider and colocation facility. For facilities with on-net cloud providers (Equinix, CoreSite, Digital Realty, NTT), we provision cross-connects directly within the facility — no last-mile, no ISP dependency, lowest possible latency. For smaller deployments or temporary operations, we configure encrypted VPN tunnels over dedicated ISP links as a cost-effective bridge while the dedicated circuit is provisioned. Every Direct Line deployment includes redundancy planning: dual circuits where budget allows, or automatic failover to encrypted internet backup.

Software Deployment

DataBridge Core is deployed to every ingest server via a single automated provisioning command. The configuration file specifies your cloud backend (S3 bucket and region, GCS bucket, R2 namespace, Azure container), buffer drive paths, lane count (default 5 per server), integrity check mode (SHA-256 manifest + S3 multipart ETag verification), and reporting endpoints for the monitoring backend. Core runs as a systemd service — it starts on boot, restarts on failure, and logs structured JSON to both local disk and the fleet-wide aggregation endpoint.

On the operator side, we distribute DataBridge Ops as a native desktop application (.dmg for macOS, .exe for Windows) to your datacenter teams. For field teams, DataBridge Tag is distributed through the same channels — it runs on any laptop or tablet and connects to the same backend API. Both apps authenticate via the central identity system, so every action (label assignment, queue reprioritization, device ejection) is attributed to a named operator in the audit trail. The deployment typically takes one day per 10 servers, including validation testing with real devices.