@Marvin Hey Marvin, getting back into data engineering after almost 2 year hiatus, good to be back and excited to see what has happened with Prefect. I have taken on a new client and I'm setting up a data pipeline for them. I'm intending to use prefect for piping logs from Kafka (that in turn got them from a CDN) into clickhouse managed cloud. I want this to happen in relative real time as prefect is nice for that as well as click house. it was a while since I used prefect, and it is a bit of a complicated service and I need your help a little bit here. My first concern is to just get it up and running in a cloud infrastructure. My client uses digital ocean, and my first approach is to get it prefect running there. However, I'm also asking you to a challenge for that idea a little bit, is it a good idea or is stuff like ECS on Amazon an important feature of the cloud to have a pretty effect working optimally? If so, does digital ocean have that? The client is not completely adverse to adding a cloud provider for data, but I want to make sure that it's a good reason to do it.

Prefect has evolved to simplify cloud infrastructure deployment, and it can be set up on various cloud providers, including Digital Ocean. However, Prefect offers specific integrations and optimizations for AWS services like ECS, which might provide enhanced features such as automatic scaling and robust monitoring. Here's a brief overview: 1. Digital Ocean: Prefect doesn't have built-in integrations specifically for Digital Ocean, but you can deploy Prefect agents on Digital Ocean droplets or Kubernetes clusters. It might require more manual setup compared to AWS, but it's doable if Digital Ocean is preferred for cost reasons. 2. AWS ECS: Prefect has direct integrations with AWS ECS, which can be beneficial for scaling and managing infrastructure more efficiently. ECS can handle container orchestration, and Prefect can leverage AWS services like CloudWatch for logging and monitoring. 3. Infrastructure Requirements: Prefect simplifies infrastructure provisioning with commands like

prefect work-pool create

with

--provision-infra

for serverless setups. This is more streamlined with providers like AWS due to existing integrations. 4. Kafka and ClickHouse: Prefect can be integrated with Kafka and ClickHouse, but this requires custom setup. Prefect's task orchestration can handle data ingestion and processing efficiently in real-time. In summary, while Digital Ocean is feasible and cost-effective for basic setups, AWS ECS offers more integrated features that might be beneficial for larger-scale or more complex data pipeline needs. If your client is open to using AWS, it might be worth considering for its additional capabilities and integrations. For more details, you can explore these resources: - Prefect AWS ECS Guide - Prefect Cloud Deployment Best Practices If you want to dive deeper into the Prefect API or need specific code examples, let me know!