Starburst Galaxy Now Available on AWS, Azure, GCP

Starburst Galaxy, our fully-managed SaaS platform, is now available on all three major clouds. Although it’s standard in our space to stagger these integrations and deploy on one cloud at a time, we don’t like waiting. Neither do all the analysts and data scientists out there who are desperate for access to more of their organization’s data. So, with that in mind, Starburst Galaxy is ready to deploy in AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure immediately.

When we founded Starburst, we set out to build a company that could provide data warehouse analytics without data warehouses. We wanted to give our customers the freedom to be curious, and to pursue answers to interesting business questions immediately, without having to appeal to IT and wait weeks or even months for datasets to be moved into place. We wanted analysts to be able to work at the speed of thought.

Starburst Enterprise

Starburst Enterprise, an entirely self-managed distribution that can be deployed anywhere, delivers on that promise. But a self-managed deployment requires specific resources and expertise. Some organizations have been clamoring for a faster, easier, and less resource-intensive path to better decisions. This is why we developed Starburst Galaxy.

Starburst Galaxy

Starburst Galaxy makes it possible for more companies to accelerate exploration by providing all the benefits of Starburst’s best-in-class MPP SQL engine on a fully-managed SaaS platform. It’s the fastest path from big data to better decisions.

The project is the work of my co-founders, the creators of Presto and Trino: David Phillips, Dain Sundstrom, and Martin Traverso. For a while now, they’ve been brainstorming how to take the core technology they developed and make it easy to consume in a cloud offering. There’s an inside-tech story here that I’ll share at some point, but originally the plan was for them to develop the second-generation version of Starburst Galaxy. Once David, Dain, Martin and our engineering team got to work, however, we quickly realized it made more sense to skip a step and launch the next iteration first. Sometimes you have to disrupt yourself.

We’ll be detailing some of Galaxy’s new features and enhancements in this blog over the next few weeks, but first I’d like to highlight a few of my favorites:

1. Auto-suspend: Everyone is trying to conserve their cloud costs – Starburst included. One of the core benefits of Starburst Enterprise is the separation of storage and compute, and Starburst Galaxy’s auto-suspend feature also takes advantage of this by putting your cluster to sleep when it’s not being used. This is going to have a huge impact on TCO.
2. Cross-Cloud Queries: Our customers often have data and Starburst deployments in different clouds and/or different cloud regions. With Starburst Galaxy, you’ll be able to query across clouds and quickly analyze this distributed data in situ, without moving data from one cloud to another.
3. Data Lake Analytics: Traditional analytics engines struggle when querying data lakes, yet more and more large organizations are embracing a data lake strategy. Building on what we’ve learned from our enterprise distribution, the team designed Starburst Galaxy to be a high-performance analytics engine for the data lake that drastically reduces time to insight.

There is more to Starburst Galaxy, and as I mentioned above, we will be detailing some of the key features and benefits in upcoming posts. Generally, though, in addition to giving analysts the freedom to be curious, Starburst Galaxy is a major step toward data democratization. The term isn’t mine, but it captures some of what we’re trying to do here at Starburst. We’re giving people the tools to pursue interesting questions without encountering the friction and roadblocks that have slowed or stopped them in the past. If you have to wait weeks or months to pursue a question, the utility of the answer declines.

As for today’s news, and the simultaneous launch—this isn’t merely a release announcement; it signifies a major step forward for our company. The fact that we’re deploying on all three hyperscale clouds at once allows Starburst as a whole to tap into these phenomenal engines of growth and unlock an entirely new expansion model for our business – one that’s as fast and frictionless as Starburst Galaxy itself. I’m thrilled about Starburst Galaxy, but I’m even more excited about what it could mean for Starburst in the years to come.

You can sign-up for Starburst Galaxy for free here!