Fresh from its recent $100 million series C financing, Starburst Data is announcing the public beta of a new managed cloud service branded Starburst Galaxy initially on AWS. Built using Kubernetes, it’s clear that Starburst is ultimately aiming to make its service work across each of the major clouds.
The Galaxy managed service, available with on-demand or annual billing, hides all the technical details around managing data sources and clusters. It manages Starburst clusters, Insights, SQL IDE, integrated data governance, and the metadata catalog through a service accessible through self-service signup. With Galaxy, customers choose target data sources, connectors, and set user credentials, and they can get started without having to specify compute instances or other configurations. As a serverless service, it will automatically scale.
This is not the first appearance of Starburst Enterprise in the cloud. It is already available on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud and marketplaces. There, customers get an image deployed, and must handle all the provisioning and housekeeping of software, just as if they were running on-premises. The marketplace editions of Starburst Enterprise are more geared for data administrators, while Galaxy was designed for self-service that could be used by business analysts.
Starburst is one of a diverse array of data virtualization and query acceleration providers whose offerings are designed to optimize performance against data lakes – which in the cloud, are essentially stores of data in cloud object storage, and provide virtualization alternatives to moving terabytes of data. It responds to an emerging demand from enterprises for data virtualization and query capabilities that are not tied to any specific cloud provider. From its origins as one of the massively parallel engines to speed up querying Hadoop, Starburst has expanded the portfolio for connectors to go against a 30+ targets including cloud object storage, data warehouse, and NoSQL database targets. For Galaxy, the beta, Starburst Galaxy has native connectivity to S3 and AWS RDS (MySQL and PostgreSQL), with more to come when it hits GA
Andrew Brust has covered the saga of Presto, which has now forked into two separate projects and two companies: Ahana, which emerged from stealth less than a year ago with less than $5 million in funding, and Starburst, whose recent round brought total funding to over $160 million. To cut through the confusion, Starburst renamed the PrestoSQL project as Trino. Starburst Galaxy is now available in a public beta on AWS.
Disclosure: Starburst Data is a dbInsight client.