A computer program product for provisioning resources in a balanced data transfer pipeline may associate a first requested task with a first category, allocate a first resource of a data path to the first requested task based on the first resource corresponding to the first category; and allocate a second resource as part of the data path to the first requested task based on the second resource corresponding to the first category, wherein the first resource corresponds to a first segment of the data path and the second resource corresponds to a second segment of the data path.