About

Zalando SE, Europe’s leading online platform for fashion and lifestyle, boasts $5B in annual revenue, largely from selling brand-name clothing and footwear online. The company has thousands of business and marketing analysts who need a fast, simple, reliable way to query data with MicroStrategy. When Zalando decided to transition from legacy data warehouses to an Amazon S3 cloud data lake, it wanted to give its buyers and business analysts a more efficient way to extract value from this distributed data. Zalando deployed Starburst Enterprise for superior stability, fine-grained security, cost savings, and more.

Challenge

Making smart, analytics-based business decisions is more important than ever in this uncertain global economy. However, Zalando had siloed data warehouse platforms, and the business intelligence and analytics teams couldn’t query data without costly and time-consuming ETL.

When Zalando decided to transition from legacy data warehouses to an Amazon S3 cloud data lake, the company also needed to give its buyers and business analysts a more efficient way to extract value from this distributed data in order to launch its Customer 360 program.

Zalando uses Spark for its data transformation and data science activities — to build and train the machine learning models that drive its recommendation engines. The company also has thousands of business and marketing analysts who need a fast, simple, reliable way to query Zalando’s data through MicroStrategy.

The company’s initial choice was Trino, the world’s fastest distributed SQL query engine. But the open source deployment couldn’t deliver the efficiency, fine-grained security, and enterprise-grade features Zalando required.

Solution

After Zalando chose Amazon S3 as the place to build its data lake, it selected Starburst Enterprise for its security, enterprise support, and superior performance.

Starburst provides Zalando with:

Enterprise support – including 24/7/365 support from true Trino experts.
Platform stability & performance – Starburst deploys fully tested, stable releases that work from day one.
Security & GDPR – Starburst’s fine-grained security and role-based access control features meet GDPR requirements.
Starburst Enterprise and Spark – the company is able to use both solutions in complementary functions, with Spark preparing the data and Starburst Enterprise serving the data with fine-grained access control.

“We can discover, access, and analyze data in our data lake with our preferred tools, and leverage it for business intelligence and data science,” says Miorin. “This streamlined workflow helps our executives make the right decisions on time, and fosters innovation through machine learning.”

As the fully supported, production-tested, enterprise-grade distribution of open source Trino, Starburst Enterprise is constantly adding connectors, demonstrating Starburst’s ongoing commitment to provide fast access to customer data no matter where it resides.

Results

Starburst enables Zalando to scale its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) resources up during peak usage, and scale down at other times to save on costs, giving the company unprecedented flexibility.

“Auto-scaling with graceful shutdown was another attractive feature,” Miorin notes. “We are saving 50% on our AWS compute costs.”

The business intelligence and analytics teams can now join and access data without costly and time-consuming ETL.

“We have gotten very good feedback from our users. With Starburst, queries are now faster, and users can see the difference,” says Miorin. “I cannot share the number, but our daily queries are increasing over time. We have observed that users are gravitating toward Starburst.”

With AWS and Starburst Enterprise, Zalando has the fast, affordable, secure data access the company needs to maintain its position as Europe’s e-commerce leader in a difficult economy.

Starburst’s mission is to free our customers to see the invisible and achieve the impossible

Zalando Case Study