How Life360 Uses StarTree Pinot to Power Real-Time Family Safety
Sesson title: Inside Life360’s Family Safety and Real-Time Geospatial Analytics
When your task is to help nearly 100 million people around the world keep track of their loved ones, delays are not an option. That’s why Life360 chose StarTree’s managed Apache Pinot service to support an ambitious upgrade of its service to support real-time location tracking.
Life360 is a fast-growing family safety platform with more than 88 million monthly active users as of late 2024. Most people use its app to monitor the whereabouts of family members. The service also provides crash alerts, identity protection and the ability for people to easily local important items like keys and wallets.
Life360’s data footprint has been steadily expanding as it has added services. Its 2021 acquisition of Bluetooth tracker maker Tile and wearable GPS firm Jiobit gave it the ability to track objects and pets. A recent partnership with Hubble Network will make it possible for Life360 to spot Bluetooth devices by satellite, making its scope truly global. That translates into a tidal wave of data.
The company’s services generate up to 700,000 location records per second – or 85 billion per day – across hundreds of millions of devices, said Stephen Dornan, Life360’s Director of Engineering, in a presentation at the Real-Time Analytics Summit hosted by StarTree. That volume will grow as the Hubble service expands from three to 96 satellites over the next three years, enabling nearly constant monitoring. “If we keep on our current growth pace we’ll have 150 million members by the end of 2027,” Dornan said. “You can do the numbers on how much data we’re going to have in our system.”
As its business has grown, Life360 found it needed an analytics platform that can ingest, index, query, and present large volumes of data in near real time. That’s beyond the capacity of traditional analytics platforms, which are limited to historical data. The company also had ambitious response time targets: Queries to be answered in less than 90 milliseconds to meet strict round-trip service level agreements. The architecture also had to uphold rigorous privacy standards and scale efficiently without breaking the bank.
Apache Pinot met the company’s requirements for real-time performance, but the complexity of provisioning for on-premises deployment would have added cost and delays. Life360 opted for the managed StarTree Cloud platform for simplicity and its enterprise-grade features like tiered storage, ingest-time reconciliation, and strong security.
Deploying StarTree wasn’t plug-and-play, Dornan said. The firm had never before engaged with a “bring your own cloud” managed service provider, a fact that introduced some technical and organizational challenges.
One of the biggest was harmonizing security policies between the two organizations. Life360’s infrastructure needed to communicate with StarTree’s using tightly scoped virtual private cloud peering connections that adhered to Life360’s strict information security rules. This required new configurations, governance models, and monitoring practices, Dornan said. .
Another hurdle was cost optimization. While StarTree offered tiered storage using Amazon S3 to reduce spend, Life360 had to tighten its resource allocation and ingestion rules to stay within budget.
Despite the complexity, the rollout moved fast once the foundational infrastructure was set up, Dornan said. A proof of concept was completed in three weeks and data ingestion began immediately afterward. Within just one week, StarTree had ingested the most recent location data for more than 80 million users, eliminating the need to backfill historical records.
Real-Time Visibility and Platform Growth
The new architecture enabled by StarTree Pinot now powers real-time analytics across Life360’s products. Mobile clients talk to the same application servers as they did before, but those servers now write location data directly to Pinot. The result: sub-second visibility into user locations with high geographic precision and data privacy built in.
Life360 enabled upserts – an efficiency feature that combines updates and inserts in a single command – to track the latest known location of each user. Real-time trip reconstruction is now possible using geospatial indexes and a combination of current and historical records. Device- and user-level privacy controls comply with GDPR, CCPA, and other global regulations
The platform supports high query volumes and fast responses for both internal dashboards and customer-facing features. For example, when a parent enters “focus mode” in the app to monitor a child’s location, the child’s phone automatically switches to updating every two seconds. Dornan said Pinot keeps pace effortlessly.
StarTree’s S3-based tiered storage integration helps manage storage costs while allowing 24 hours of recent location history to remain queryable at low latency. Older data resides in a data lake for analytics at scale.
Dornan related some of the lessons Life360 learned from its experience:
Real-time architecture is not a plug-in upgrade. The move requires new infrastructure, design patterns, and ways of thinking.
Security integration is hard. Millisecond speeds leave little room for traditional security checks like thorough validation, encryption at rest, or access audits. Trust boundaries, authentication mechanisms, and network access policies must be strictly defined and enforced.
It takes time to see value. Although ingesting data went quickly once configured, setting up the core systems and security took more time and effort than anticipated.
Managed services add critical value. Without StarTree’s support for ingest-time optimizations and enterprise security, Life360 would have needed to invest heavily in building its own extensions to open-source Pinot.
Life360 is continuing to expand the capabilities of its platform, especially as it prepares to ingest even more data from the growing Hubble satellite constellation. Real-time analytics will remain core to the company’s mission of protecting families, pets, and possessions—no matter where in the world they are.