Adopting ArcGIS Data Pipelines
Tens of thousands of hosted feature layers are made daily in ArcGIS Online.
Below is one I made - street address points in the city of Los Angeles, sourced from the city's open data site.
I didn't make the layer with ArcGIS Data Pipelines, you can tell by the tuned widths of the text fields in the Fields view.
But I can automatically maintain the layer (it has daily changes) with a simple pipeline. Go ahead and click the link, the pipeline is shared to everyone - here's what you'll see:
Crazy simple, isn't it! The secret sauce is schema mapping. Knowing the output schema is defined by the existing layer, and editing the Input schema appropriately to match the field types, the Map Fields tool lets me connect the incoming field names to the output field names with no further data preparation required.
Here is how Map Fields looks in my case (sorry, not enough real estate to show the whole dialog):
Having connected everything (ObjectID is not mapped) and set the output write method to Replace, I can set up a schedule for the pipeline to run after hours and I'm done!
So, all you owners of hosted feature layers, if ArcGIS Data Pipelines can reach your source data, you have a lightweight option to maintain your data, regardless of how you created it.