CHORDS, an EarthCube Building Block, addresses the ever-increasing importance of real-time scientific data, particularly in mission critical scenarios, where informed decisions must be made rapidly. Many of the phenomenon occurring within the geosciences, ranging from hurricanes and severe weather, to earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes and floods, can benefit from better handling of real-time data. The National Science Foundation funds many small teams of researchers residing at Universities whose currently inaccessible measurements could contribute to a better understanding of these phenomenon in order to ultimately improve forecasts and predictions. We highlight the recently developed CHORDS portal tools and processing systems aimed at addressing some of the gaps in handling real-time data, particularly in the provisioning of data from the “long-tail” scientific community through a simple interface deployed in the cloud. CHORDS instances currently in use include those from hydrology, atmosphere, and solid earth sensors. Broad use of the CHORDS framework will expand the role of real-time data within the geosciences, and enhance the potential of streaming data sources to enable adaptive experimentation and real-time hypothesis testing. CHORDS enables real-time data to be discovered and accessed using existing standards for straightforward integration into analysis, visualization and modeling tools. CHORDS leverages the Ruby on Rails web framework, enabling faster development and concise code, leading to better maintainability. With an aim to ease use by smaller research groups without dedicated IT/development support, CHORDS is deployed via Docker containers to various cloud environments, such as Amazon AWS/EC2. An API is provided for researchers to enable instrumentation to send data into the system as well as allowing configuration changes to the site itself.