Announcing Self-Service StarTree Cloud for Developers

We are excited to announce StarTree’s Self-Service Cloud. With this preview version, developers across the world can ingest data into Apache Pinot cluster in just a few clicks and integrate with their apps to deliver real-time analytics with millisecond response times and high throughput. We are offering a 30 days free trial and you can take it for a spin with just an email address. For the first 100 users, this includes a self-service provisioned Apache Pinot cluster that can support upto 1 TB of data and upto 50 QPS, StarTree Data Manager for no-code data ingestion, and a set of Pinot APIs to integrate with data apps and external BI tools. If you’d like to jump right in, get started here.

Everyone today is a decision-maker. Real-time analytics from data make intelligent choices possible and unlock data insights. In the last decade, we have seen a widespread adoption of open-source data infrastructure to power real-time analytics usecases. Apache Pinot itself is the leading open source OLAP columnar datastore in the industry. Over the past year, Apache Pinot downloads grew nearly 20X from 50,000 in 2020 to one million in 2021. The Apache Pinot open source Slack community also grew 30X, from 100 members to nearly 3,000 members today. Pinot is already being used by Fortune 500 companies across a number of different verticals and usecases. It has been proven at scale at LinkedIn (eg: Who’s Viewed My Profile), Stripe (eg: Ledger Observability), RazorPay, Uber (eg: Orders Near You, Freights Carrier Scorecard), DoorDash (eg: Merchant Portal), Cisco (eg: Webex), Walmart, WePay (eg: Reporting) and many other companies, delivering query results with fresh data and in millisecond response time. Apache Pinot is at the heart of modern data architectures. 

Self-Service StarTree Cloud completes Apache Pinot by delivering on the following three key pillars-

• Time to Value – While the open source community can provide quick and easy access to Pinot itself, cluster setup, configuration, monitoring and data ingestion on your own can all increase time to value and operational burden. With self-service StarTree Cloud, as a fully-managed cloud service, you can ingest data into Pinot and run your first query without having to speak to a human or undergo a lengthy discussion meeting. It comes with automated setup, configuration and upgrades of Pinot components, supports out-of-box networking, monitoring and security (for data at rest and data in flight) to connect with data sources as well as query connectors and innovative Apache Pinot extensions such as Tiered Storage.

Fig 1: StarTree Cloud Portal

• Ease of Ingestion – Most users are convinced of the need to onboard data into a specialized OLAP system such as Pinot for analytical queries from various different sources. This requires them to write additional code or glue together scripts in order to ingest and model the data so that it’s analytics ready. StarTree Cloud includes StarTree Data Manager – no-code ingestion service that supports several connectors to ingest data from your favorite data source – stream (eg: Confluent Cloud), batch (eg: AWS S3) and data warehouse (eg: Snowflake). You can perform data modeling, insert derived columns as well as set and adjust Pinot table configs (if needed) without writing a single line of code.

Fig 2: StarTree Data Manager

• Value Added Apps – Data apps have the potential to transform companies from “data hoarders” into “data monetizers.” Pinot unlocks a completely new category of apps to derive actionable insights in real-time that are not just available today. For instance, manual monitoring and identifying metric outliers in data is slow, tedious and often inaccurate when dealing with high-dimensional real-time data or large volumes of data. Moreover, when an anomaly is detected for a metric, it’s harder to analyze and derive insights on which dimensions and value within the dimensions have contributed towards the anomaly. StarTree ThirdEye – A real-time anomaly detection and insights platform allows users to detect, visualize and investigate anomalies in their time series data stored in Pinot using pluggable detection algorithms (such as Holt Winters). For businesses and environments, where making faster decision matters, ThirdEye and its integration with Pinot helps reduce Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) for anomalies. StarTree ThirdEye is offered as an add-on app (more apps to come) in StarTree Cloud and can be made available in the trial upon request.

Fig 3: StarTree ThirdEye

StarTree is made by the team that originally created Apache Pinot. It builds on multiple years of operational expertise that the team has gathered from running Pinot as a service for several applications at companies such as LinkedIn and Uber to supporting StarTree’s customers doing the same. You and your team can meet all your critical p95 and p99 query SLAs for your apps while letting us do the heavy lifting for you.

The 30-day self-service free trial is currently available to deploy on AWS (GCP is supported on BYOC and SaaS Edition of StarTree Cloud with Azure support coming soon). Once you have set up your account with StarTree Cloud and submitted a request to create a “workspace” through the StarTree Cloud portal, StarTree Cloud automation kicks into action by setting up the cloud native infrastructure in StarTree’s cloud, carves out a Pinot cluster along with StarTree Data Manager service, and sets up authenticated and secure public networking for accessing Data Manager and Pinot Query Console. Pinot APIs can be used to integrate with apps and tools in a secure way as well. The limited time free trial comes provisioned with 1TB of storage and the ability to support up to 50 queries per second.

Getting started with Self-Service StarTree Cloud is easy; all you need is a business email and, in a few clicks, you can ingest data into Pinot and run your first query. Sign up to get started on your trial. Here are some resources to help you during the trial. You can read through our documentation, watch the Self-Service StarTree Cloud video and join StarTree community Slack channel where you’ll find us to help you on your trial journey. We look forward to you joining us in pioneering the user-facing analytics revolution.