Can you safely rely upon Yahoo Pipes to offload ETL for your application?

Question

Yahoo Pipes are a very intriguing choice for sort of a poor-man's server-free ETL solution, but would it be a good idea to build an application around one or many Pipes? I've really only used them for toy things here and there, with the only thing I've used longer than a week or two being one amalgamated and filtered RSS feed that I've plugged into Google Reader (which has worked great, but if it goes out for a while I wouldn't notice).

So, my question is, would building an application around Yahoo Pipes be reliable (available most of the time)? Ideally it'd be something I could rely on being up 99+% of the time.

It looks like the Pipes Terms of Use permit building apps around it, but I am unfamiliar with anyone building anything significant using them.

Answer 1

I think this is really, up to your definitions of "safely" and "most of the time".

The best place to start is the Pipes Terms of Use. In it, Yahoo makes no guarantees of uptime, and has lots of denials of liability.

What happens in your system if Pipes goes away for a while?

Section 1.F.iii clearly states that you should not rely on pipes for very critical systems:

YOU SHALL NOT: Use Yahoo! Pipes to operate nuclear facilities, life support, or other mission critical application where human life or property may be at stake. You understand that Yahoo! Pipes is not designed for such purposes and that their failure in such cases could lead to death, personal injury, or severe property or environmental damage for which Yahoo! is not responsible;

From my experience, Pipes does not have extended outages but past stability is no indicator of future stability, and Yahoo may terminate the service at any point.

I can use it "safely" since if the service goes away, I will either not miss the data, or can implement a workaround using another service in a timely manner.