Moderate to move
Dataflow on DigitalOcean: what it becomes and what it costs.
On DigitalOcean, Dataflow becomes Beam on the Apache Flink runner on DigitalOcean Kubernetes (DOKS). Beam pipelines run unchanged on the Flink runner; only the managed runner is lost.
Effort grade
Moderate
Same software, self-hosted: you patch, back up and fix it
Cost after the move, before engineer time
40% of today
Dataflow bills vCPU at $0.056/h and memory at $0.0035/GB-h on top of the VMs; Flink on CX33 servers, about 40%.
Engineer time
6 h a month
To run the replacement: patching, backups, on-call. Plus about 5 engineer days for the move itself.
Your own Dataflow line, from your export
Drop one month of your Google Cloud cost export and the report prices every service, Dataflow included, on DigitalOcean list prices of 18 Oct 2026, net of the engineer time to run it. In your browser; nothing is uploaded.