How Tubular Labs reclaimed 50% of engineering capacity by rebuilding their 70TB pipeline on Apache Iceberg and Amazon S3 Tables

This article describes how Tubular Labs rebuilt their 70TB video analytics pipeline using Apache Iceberg and Amazon S3 Tables, creating a Common Pipeline Runtime that eliminated operational complexity and reclaimed significant engineering capacity.

• Replaced fragile file-based pipelines with a Common Pipeline Runtime (CPR) built on Apache Spark, Apache Iceberg, and Amazon S3 Tables
• Reduced mean time to repair (MTTR) from 12-16 hours to approximately 40 minutes through idempotent, atomic writes
• Cut pipeline runtime from 6-8 hours to under 2 hours for multi-billion-row merges and validation
• Reclaimed 50% of engineering capacity previously spent on incident triage and data recovery
• Simplified pipeline code from 500+ lines to 50-100 lines by centralizing infrastructure logic in the runtime
• S3 Tables automatically handles Iceberg compaction and maintenance, eliminating manual operational overhead

By separating business logic from infrastructure concerns and leveraging managed Iceberg operations, Tubular Labs achieved a sustainable architecture for handling 2 billion daily row updates while freeing engineers to focus on feature development.