---
title: "What is Bobsled?"
slug: "introduction-to-bobsled"
updated: 2025-08-12T14:45:03Z
published: 2025-08-12T14:45:03Z
canonical: "bobsled.com/introduction-to-bobsled"
---

> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://bobsled.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# What is Bobsled?

![](https://cdn.document360.io/87a415ff-4d6a-4c0c-adbb-26c563a2d9a8/Images/Documentation/SH.png)

**Bobsled** is a modern data fulfillment platform that helps teams **share, deliver, and customize datasets** across clouds, regions, and tools—without the complexity of traditional pipelines.

At its core, Bobsled turns raw or refined data into **Data Products** that can be shared with internal teams, partners, or customers—**without maintaining pipelines**, worrying about replication logic, or managing infrastructure.

---

## Why does Bobsled exist?

Organizations increasingly need to deliver data:

- Across cloud providers
- Between analytics platforms
- To internal teams or external customers

Most solutions either involve hand-rolled pipelines or brittle integrations. Bobsled replaces that with an opinionated, infrastructure-aware approach:

- **No-code for non-engineers**
- **Fully automated for engineers**
- **Cloud-native and region-aware**

You don’t have to choose between flexibility and simplicity.

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## Why build with Bobsled?

- **Global connections:** Share analytics-ready data directly to external teams anywhere in the cloud.
- **Zero-copy data products**: Build and share logical views of a common data asset without replication.
- **Egress-free infrastructure:** Never pay egress to share data from Bobsled.
- **Point-and-click UI:** Empower non-technical stakeholders to customize and deliver data products.
- **Powerful APIs:** Integrate data sharing into an existing pipeline or app.
- **Pre-built Integrations:** Sync “gold” data assets from your data warehouse or file storage into Bobsled instantly.

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## What can you build?

Scalable, cost-efficient data feeds customers and partners love.

| **Cloud Data Feeds** | Customize and share [Data Products](/v2/docs/what-are-data-products) to customers natively in their Data Warehouse or File Storage. |
| --- | --- |
| **Out-of-app Analytics** | Enable users to access and analyze application data in their data platform. |
| **Automated fulfillment** | Automate [data fulfillmen](/v2/docs/what-is-data-fulfillment)t by integrating data sharing into a workflow or marketplace. |

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## Two Ways to Use Bobsled

Bobsled has two core modes of operation. Which one you use depends on whether you want us to **manage a replica of your data** or simply **move it directly**.

### **1.** Sledhouse (Managed replication and distribution)

Bobsled creates and maintains a [Sledhouse Table](/v2/docs/what-is-a-sledhouse-table)—a golden, analytics-ready copy of your source data stored in our infrastructure. From there, you can:

- Keep it in sync on a schedule you define
- Create [Data Products](/v2/docs/what-are-data-products) (filtered or transformed subsets) without touching the source
- [Fulfill](/v2/docs/what-is-data-fulfillment) those Data Products to destinations like Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, S3, or GCS
- Optionally use Local Copies for performance-friendly, in-region delivery

Because the data is already staged in Sledhouse, fulfillment is fast, consistent, and doesn’t repeatedly pull from your source.

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### 2. Transfers (Data pipeline)

For cases where you don’t want a managed replica, Bobsled can move data directly from source to destination via a Bobsled [Share](/v2/docs/configure-share). You still get:

- Flexible pipeline configuration
- Automatic format conversion
- Scheduling and monitoring in the same UI
- Logging, error handling, and retries

In [Transfers](/v2/docs/bobsled-overview), **each pipeline is self-contained**—you configure every source-to-destination share yourself. There’s no persistent copy in between, so each fulfillment pulls from the source at run time.

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Explore our documentation to learn how to implement Bobsled across your data stack—from [Sledhouse quickstart guide](/v2/docs/getting-started-with-sledhouse) to navigating the [application](/v2/docs/bobsled-application).