Elevate Apache Pinot with StarTree Cloud

StarTree elevates Apache Pinot into a fully managed, production-grade platform, making real-time analytics easier to scale, faster to deploy, and more cost-efficient to operate
EXPERT SUPPORT 

Support from the creators of Apache Pinot

When you become a StarTree customer, you’re not just adopting a technology — you’ll be getting support from a team that consists of many of the founding engineers and committers to Apache Pinot.

Our team work hands-on with yours – from onboarding through production, helping with everything from data modeling and pipeline integration to query optimization and system tuning. Whether you need help scaling a critical dashboard, configuring ingestion from Kafka, or navigating schema design, you’ll have direct access to the same experts who helped companies like Stripe, Cisco, and DoorDash build their Pinot-based systems. 
Deployment options

Fully managed, with flexible deployment options

StarTree offers deployment options that give you flexibility to work with preferred cloud vendors, with data stored in your cloud or ours, and single tenant or multiple tenant architectures.
StarTree Cloud

SaaS

Get started quickly with the fully managed, StarTree Cloud service. Ideal for organizations that want zero ops overhead and rapid time-to-value.

Setup is simple, leaving you to focus on your data, your schema, and queries. And your SaaS instance is isolated from noisy neighbors at the infrastructure level.

Bring your own cloud

BYOC

For customers who prefer dedicated infrastructure and deeper integration with enterprise systems, we offer a Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) model with VPC peering, custom SLAs, and enhanced observability.

In this case, the entire software stack is deployed in your cloud account and data never leaves your governance boundary

Bring your own KUBERNETES

BYOK

For highly regulated environments, StarTree can be deployed behind your firewall—offering full control while still leveraging the power and capabilities of StarTree Cloud.

With this model you can deploy the entire stack in an existing Kubernetes cluster. This can be done in a given cloud provider (eg: Amazon EKS) or in a self-managed Kubernetes cluster on baremetal.

EXTENDED Capabilities

StarTree enhances Apache Pinot with features that make it more powerful while lowering costs.

PRECISION FETCH

Interactive Queries with Tiered Storage

StarTree’s “Precision Fetching” on tiered storage enables Pinot to do fast, interactive queries on data stored in cloud object stores (like S3). This capability is highly performant as it is able to fetch only the data needed for the query.

Precise fetch makes it viable to move historical data to more affordable cloud storage – all while maintaining interactive query response times.

Learn More

Scalable Upserts & Deduplication

Upserts that scale

Upserts in open-source Apache Pinot are limited by the memory overhead needed to handle the primary key map. This puts a limit on how far you can push upsert functionalities.

StarTree Cloud has addressed this limitation to allow updates to billions of primary keys per server—without compromising speed or concurrency. This makes real-time, mutable datasets possible at scale.

Learn More

"The benefits of migrating to StarTree and Pinot center around three areas: query performance, SLAs, and cost. With Pinot, we are now in the subseconds to milliseconds range, and the higher query concurrency means we can serve more customers faster. With the switch to Pinot, we've been able to reduce our infrastructure costs and reduce our dependencies on older technologies."
Joanes Espanol
CTO and Co-Founder
IMPROVED DATA MANAGEMENT & ADMINISTRATION

Data management made simpler and more flexible.

StarTree’s Data Portal makes it simpler to ingest, manage, and evolve data in Apache Pinot. With intuitive controls for schema evolution, performance tuning, and backfills, you can make critical data changes easily, and without disrupting operations.

Automate operations on StarTree Cloud

Performance Manager

Replaces manual query optimization with ML-driven recommendations and guided index selection. Performance Manager analyzes query patterns to provide one-click optimizations, delivering up to 4x faster queries while balancing storage costs.

Schema Evolution

Enables zero-downtime schema updates in continuous data flows, allowing users to add or modify columns, fields or indexes while the system runs. Ensures continuous query availability during structural changes.

Data Backfill

Automates the detection and filling of data gaps, enabling seamless reloading of data from past events without impacting real-time operations. Maintains consistency across datasets through an automated workflow. More

Dynamic Autoscaling

StarTree enables you to dynamically scale and optimize resources with Minion Autoscaling to avoid paying for idle infrastructure while maintaining performance under load.

Learn More

Role Based Access Control

Support for custom OIDC-compatible Identity Service Providers (IDP) for user authentication and RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) for fast, fine-grained permission enforcement across the data plane. More

Improved Query Console

Interacting with data in Pinot is more efficient with the StarTree Query Console which introduces multi-tabs, syntax highlighting, save query support and a modern UI.
KEEPING PACE WITH CHANGE

Ready for AI and modern workloads

With StarTree Cloud, Pinot is keeping pace with the latest development and evolving industry standards—making it a future-proof foundation for the next wave of intelligent data products. 

Query data in Iceberg & Parquet

Query directly from your data lakehouse. StarTree’s Iceberg and Parquet support opens up the ability to serve low latency and high concurrency analytics without moving data or stitching together brittle pipelines.

More

MCP Server for Apache Pinot

MCP provides a standardized interface for AI models to interact with your data. StarTree’s MCP Server enables AI applictions to get instantaneous responses to queries on rapidly changing data – critical for maintaining AI agent context and fluid interactions

More

Vector auto-embedding for building real-time RAG.

Apache Pinot added support for vectors in 2024. This enables AI models to reason over live data instead of stale snapshots. And with vector auto embedding, StarTree makes that power easier to harness. Generate, ingest, and index vector embeddings in a fully integrated workflow, bypassing the need for complex, stitched-together pipelines.

More

Grafana integration to support observability 

StarTree offers seamless integration with Grafana for data visualization and monitoring. This integration allows users to leverage Grafana’s dashboards to interactively visualize data stored and analyzed by Pinot. 

More

SECURITY & PRIVACY

Your data remains private and secure

StarTree is deeply committed to protecting customer and internal data with robust security measures for devices, networks, and systems. StarTree follows strict adherence to regulatory compliance to ensure data integrity and trust.
Robust Authentication & Authorization
Encryption of data at rest and in transit
Networking Security
Audit trails and data loss prevention
StarTree Security & Compliance
CUSTOMER STORIES

Real-time use-cases thrive on StarTree

Token-Level Observability for LLMs: How Together AI Does It

As large language models (LLMs) become core infrastructure, a new engineering challenge is taking shape: capturing how these models are used—and how they behave—as it happens. It’s no longer sufficient to count API calls or log failures after the fact. …

Learn more
Sub-second
Query Latency
High-cardinality
slicing and dicing
10 second
freshness windows

MiQ Reinvents Programmatic Campaign Building with a Unified, AI-Driven Audiences Platform

MiQ’s Audiences engine is powered by a modern data stack designed for speed, scale, and flexibility. MiQ replaced Amazon Athena with StarTree, a real-time analytics engine built on Apache Pinot, to support the platform’s advanced search and indexing capabilities.

Learn more
~2 second
Segment listing latency
40-80% Acceleration
on metric calculations
Query Caching Eliminated
Due to performance gains

Analyzing Financial Transactions Using StarTree Cloud

Razorpay – India’s fastest-growing payment processing company – chose StarTree, powered by Apache Pinot, for real-time analytics in its user-facing applications, including its Success Rate and internal monitoring dashboards.

Learn more
1-3 seconds
p99 latencies
200 million
events ingested daily
50% savings
for upsert tables costs
At a glance

How do Pinot and StarTree Compare?

Group Feature Open Source Apache Pinot StarTree Cloud Adds…
Managed Service Operations & Management Users manage cluster tuning, scaling, upgrades, monitoring Fully managed by Pinot creators; automated lifecycle mgmt
Support Community-based support Proactive monitoring and management by the largest team of Pinot committers/PMCs, with enterprise-grade SLAs. More
System Observability Limited Out of the box support for system metrics (Grafana), logs (Loki) and query debuggability (Loki + StarTree Query Console)
Value-Add Features Minion Auto Scaling Not available Automated background tasks (compaction, rebalancing, indexing) without query impact. More
Precise Fetching Not available Retrieves only needed data from S3, delivering sub-second queries while cutting compute/storage costs. More
AZ-Aware Kafka Ingestion Custom Setup Out of the box setup to reduce cross-AZ traffic costs during ingestion
AZ aware HA setup Custom setup Out of the box support for multi-zone deployments for HA deployments. More
Scalable Upserts Limited to in-memory Enterprise-grade off-heap upserts with high-concurrency and fast updates. More
Advanced Indexes Core indexes only Sparse Index (efficient selective queries); Composite JSON Index (nested queries)
ML-Driven Query Optimization Manual tuning required Automated index selection and query tuning. More
Automated Data Backfill Manual Detects and fills data gaps without pipeline disruption. More
Security Basic controls Role-based access control, encryption, SSO (OIDC), SOC2/ISO/HIPAA compliance, audit logs and AWS secrets manager support. More
Data onboarding Wizard Limited Intuitive UI based wizard for onboarding new datasets with automated schema inference, data preview and data modelling support
Integrations Apache Iceberg Not built-in Native Iceberg connector for lakehouse queries without pipelines/duplication. More
Delta Lake Not built-in Native Delta Lake connector. More
Snowflake Not built-in Native Snowflake connector. More
Grafana Not built-in Native plugin + PromQL-style queries for observability. More
Model Context Protocol (MCP) Not available Secure, real-time LLM/AI agent access to Pinot data. More
Vector Embedding Hosting Not available Hosts embeddings for semantic search & RAG use cases.More
AWS Graviton Support Not optimized Cost-efficient compute with ARM-based Graviton processors.More

Request a Trial

The best way to discover real-time analytics with Apache Pinot is to try it yourself – and there’s no easier way than StarTree Cloud. 

Get started today