Stripe, DoorDash, Nubank, Razorpay, Cisco Webex, and more rely on StarTree to manage their Apache Pinot environments—scaling real-time data products at lower costs.
Cut Apache Pinot Costs by Over 60%
Running Apache Pinot™ in-house can quickly become expensive. It’s not just the time and expertise required to keep it performant and reliable at scale, but it’s in infrastructure costs as well.
StarTree lowers total cost of ownership, provides faster time-to-value, and leaves you with more engineering bandwidth to build the data products that drive your business forward.
Scaling Economics Through a Managed Service Model
Operating Apache Pinot™ at scale demands deep, specialized expertise—from cluster tuning and index optimization to version upgrades, monitoring, and performance troubleshooting. StarTree Cloud removes that operational burden entirely, delivering a fully managed service run by the original creators of Apache Pinot and supported by the largest concentration of Pinot committers and PMC members in the world. Our team has shaped Pinot’s architecture from its inception, so we know every performance lever and scaling technique inside and out. This expert-led model not only accelerates deployment and scaling but also delivers true economies of scale—giving you enterprise-grade reliability, speed, and resilience without the cost and complexity of building an in-house operations team.
Lower Compute and Storage Costs Through StarTree Innovations
Beyond managing your Pinot environment, StarTree adds efficiency features that directly cut infrastructure spend:
- Precise Fetching – Minimizes data retrieval to only what’s needed, reducing compute costs.
- Apache Iceberg Support – Serve sub-second queries directly from cost-efficient object storage formats.
- Graviton Support – Leverages AWS Graviton processors for lower-cost, high-efficiency compute.
- AZ-Aware Kafka Consumption – Optimizes data ingestion across availability zones to reduce cross-AZ costs.
- Auto-Scaling Minions – Continuously monitor workloads and automatically shut down unused compute to eliminate waste.
The result: significant savings versus open source Pinot on both compute and storage—without sacrificing speed.
Essential Value-Add Features Beyond Open Source Pinot
StarTree Cloud builds upon Pinot’s open-source foundation, delivering the performance, security, and operational capabilities enterprises require:
Data Portal – Secure, Real-Time Data Management
Data Portal is the control center for managing Pinot at enterprise scale—a single pane of glass for evolving schemas, tuning indexes, managing access, and backfilling data, all without slowing ingestion or queries.
It delivers:
- Zero-Downtime Schema Evolution – Safely modify schemas without interrupting ingestion or queries.
- ML-Driven Query Optimization – Automated index selection and query tuning to keep performance high.
- Automated Data Backfill – Detects and fills gaps without disrupting real-time pipelines
Security is built in with:
- Authentication & Encryption – Data protected in transit and at rest
- SSO Integration – Works with any OIDC-compliant identity provider
- Role-Based Access Control – Advanced row-level granularity
- Compliance Certifications – SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA
- Operational Reliability at Scale
Operational Reliability at Scale
Automated monitoring, alerting, and scaling ensure your analytics platform stays responsive and resilient under heavy load.
- Kubernetes Pinot Operator – Simplifies cloud-native deployments by automating cluster lifecycle management. Without it, open-source users face significant challenges managing deployments, replacing nodes, or scaling clusters up and down. The operator handles these tasks seamlessly, making Pinot cloud-ready.
- StarTree Minions – Lightweight background workers that manage maintenance tasks like segment rebalancing, compaction, and indexing without impacting query performance. This keeps clusters optimized and healthy while handling unpredictable traffic spikes without downtime or manual intervention.
Together, these capabilities give enterprises the reliability of a self-healing system that adapts automatically to workload changes, freeing engineers from constant cluster babysitting.
Performance Enhancements
- StarTree’s scalable upserts keep datasets continuously accurate without slowing ingestion, enabling real-time updates for rapidly changing data.
- Precise fetching minimizes data retrieval to only what’s needed, maintaining sub-second query performance even as data sets grow.
- Advanced indexes, including the Sparse Index, designed for pinpoint efficiency. Instead of indexing every column, it targets only highly selective ones—reducing storage overhead and accelerating query performance. This makes large-scale Pinot workloads faster, lighter, and more cost-effective without sacrificing precision. The Composite JSON Index accelerates complex JSON queries by efficiently filtering and retrieving nested fields, with enhanced control over path selection and the ability to configure internal range or text indexes.
Together, these capabilities help ensure that high-volume, high-concurrency Pinot workloads remain fast and consistent.
AI-Ready and Cloud-Native Capabilities
StarTree modernizes Apache Pinot to meet the demands of AI-native applications and modern cloud architectures—unlocking integrations and workflows that open-source Pinot can’t deliver out of the box.
Native Apache Iceberg Support
Seamlessly bridge real-time analytics and lakehouse architectures, enabling direct, low-latency queries on Iceberg tables without complex pipelines or data duplication.
Model Context Protocol (MCP) for AI Agents
Expose live data directly to AI agents with enterprise-grade security, making it possible for LLMs and autonomous agents to interact in real time with operational datasets.
Vector Embedding Model Hosting
Power semantic search, personalization, and real-time RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) use cases by hosting and managing vector embedding models alongside Pinot data.
Grafana Integration
Native Grafana support, including a Pinot datasource plugin and PromQL-style queries, delivers instant observability for real-time metrics, alerts, and dashboards.
With continuous enhancements that keep pace with AI and cloud innovation, StarTree ensures Pinot remains a long-term, future-proof foundation for building the next wave of intelligent, data-driven applications
The Path Forward for Pinot at Scale
For organizations that have invested in Apache Pinot, StarTree Cloud offers the most direct and impactful way to take it further—cutting operational overhead, unlocking enterprise-grade capabilities, and staying ahead of the curve with AI and cloud-ready innovations. Whether your priority is lowering TCO, delivering new features faster, or ensuring your platform can handle the next wave of real-time demands, StarTree delivers the expertise, reliability, and continuous innovation to make it happen.