Starburst Unveils Cross-Cloud Analytics Service

(Pixelfeger/Shutterstock)

Starburst today announced that users of its managed analytics service, Galaxy, can now access and analyze data residing in AWS, GCP, and Azure with a single query. This is an industry first for a managed service, the company says, and it’s important because it gives customers a single point of access for distributed data.

Cloud-based analytics are booming as organizations look to free themselves from the requirement to not only store vast quantities of data, but also to host the infrastructure necessary to query it. Starburst, which is a primary backer of the open source Trino project (formerly PrestoSQL), has been investing in Galaxy to enable customers to access Trino’s distributed analytics capabilities via software as a service (SaaS) subscriptions.

With the latest release of Galaxy, the company now supports the capability to execute Trino queries across all three major clouds. It also allows them to join data from data residing in multiple clouds with a single query. While organizations could achieve this on their own before, it’s the first time such a capability has been provided as a managed service, Starburst says.

The new cross-cloud analytics capability will make it easier for customers to work with data resiling in multiple silos, says Starburst CEO and co-founder Justin Borgman.

“Many vendors make their products available in each of the major cloud providers and refer to them as ‘multi-cloud,’” Borgman states in a press release. “Starburst is taking the industry to a new frontier, as the first to offer ‘cross-cloud’ analytics, enabling SQL joins across tables living in different clouds.”

Starburst cited data from a joint survey it conducted with Red Hat to show that organizations are demanding more flexibility among their cloud providers. The survey found that 62% of companies “expect to have all of their data in the cloud by the end of 2021.” While some companies will undoubtedly standardize on a single cloud provider, nearly half (47%) in the Red Hat/Starburst survey indicated they wanted the flexibility to access data from multiple clouds.

Matt Aslett, vice president and research director for Ventana Research, applauds Starburst’s approach to cross-cloud analytics.

“Analyzing data across cloud providers is a growing concern for enterprises as data is increasingly generated and stored in multiple clouds, as well as on-premises data centers,” Aslett states in a release. “Starburst is at the forefront of helping enterprises address this issue with its Starburst Galaxy managed service, which enables SQL queries to be federated across data stored in cloud object stores and data warehouses, on multiple clouds, without data movement.”

Starburst made the announcement during Amazon Web Services’ 10th annual re:Invent conference, which started Sunday and is taking place all week in Las Vegas. Starburst and AWS are working together to enable their joint customers have a good experience.

“Starburst Galaxy on AWS empowers organizations across industries with a cloud-based managed service that streamlines the querying and analysis of data so companies can quickly make data-driven decisions,” stated Sabina Joseph, general manager technology partners at AWS, in a press release.

Starburst launched Galaxy in February to capitalize on the industry’s shift to cloud-based analytics. The company, which raised $100 million in January at a $1.2 billion valuation, employed many of the key contributors to Presto, the massively parallel processing (MPP) analytics engine that was developed at Facebook as the follow-on to Apache Hive. In December 2020, the organization behind the version of Presto that Starburst backed, called PrestoSQL, changed its name to Trino to differentiate itself from the PrestoDB project.

Related Items:

Starburst Backs Data Mesh Architecture

Starburst Galaxy Manages Presto in the Cloud

Starburst Rides Presto to a $1.2B Valuation