Starburst Galaxy brings fully managed Trino deployment to AWS

Starburst, a company that targets enterprises with a commercial version of the open source Presto-based SQL query engine Trino, has launched a new fully managed cloud product for Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Trino can be traced back to Facebook in 2012, when a trio of engineers developed Presto to help the company’s data scientists and analysts run faster queries on huge swathes of data. The social networking giant open-sourced Presto the following year, and in 2019 the original Presto developers left Facebook and launched a fork called PrestoSQL, which was rebranded as Trino a few months back.

Amid all this hullabaloo, the PrestoSQL/Trino creators also launched a new commercial entity called Starburst Data (now just called “Starburst”) for enterprises. Starburst Enterprise has so far been a self-managed tool that can be hosted on-premises or on public clouds, but a few months back Starburst announced a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering called Starburst Galaxy, which this week launched in general availability after three months in public beta.

Above: Starburst Galaxy dashboard

Galaxy and beyond

While Starburst Enterprise is a fully supported product that can be deployed across clouds, the key difference is it’s managed and maintained by the customer. As a fully managed SaaS offering, Starburst Galaxy sports an integrated SQL editor for querying data out of the box and is designed to be set up in just a few clicks. It requires minimal technical support to connect new data sources or perform any kind of configuration or upgrades.

Ultimately, it’s all about reducing the infrastructure management resources required for data teams.

Above: Starburst Galaxy: Connecting a new data source

The launch comes shortly after Starburst raised $100 million in a round of funding from notable investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Salesforce Ventures, Index Partners, and Coatue.

Starburst Galaxy is currently available exclusively for AWS, meaning users can query data from Amazon S3 and AWS Glue Data Catalog. But as with the original Starburst Enterprise platform, it will eventually be made available for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.