Does Datastream require Dataflow to process the data?

[mpvega84]

I am trying to understand Datastream's pricing for real-time analytics.   It explains the $/GB for both initial migration and CDC.   However, it is not clear to me if I have to pay for Dataflow on top of that.   Is Dataflow the compute engine that powers the migration?

Or can I use Datastream by itself?

Thannks!

[sp2007]

For, Datastream's pricing is based on gigabytes (GBs) processed with different rates for CDC and Backfill [1]. Dataflow rate for pricing is based on the hour, Dataflow service usage is billed in per second increments, on a per job basis [2].

Accordingly Dataflow service fully manages Google Cloud services such as Compute Engine and Cloud Storage to run your Dataflow job, automatically spinning up and tearing down the necessary resources.

Charging is based on the product usage as Datastream streams data changes from the source database into your Cloud Storage bucket and a Dataflow job will process the files containing the changes and transfer the changes into the BigQuery datasets [3]. If BigQuery datasets is not what you need then only Datastream can be used.

Thank you

[1] https://cloud.google.com/datastream/pricing#pricing-details
[2] https://cloud.google.com/dataflow/pricing
[3] https://cloud.google.com/datastream/docs/implementing-datastream-dataflow-analytics#overview