Case Study: Starburst achieves high availability and low-latency global access with CockroachDB

How Starburst built a multi-region application with CockroachDB to guarantee high availability and low latency access for its customers

Starburst, a software company built on Trino, needed to deliver a centralized cloud lakehouse experience for customers with highly distributed data across AWS, GCP, Azure, and multiple global regions. Its challenge was building a single product with a distributed architecture that could serve data close to users, maintain high availability, and keep latency low while supporting a global customer base.

To solve this, Starburst chose Cockroach Labs’ CockroachDB Cloud as the backend for Starburst Galaxy, their fully managed cloud lakehouse. Using CockroachDB’s multi-region architecture and global table locality, Starburst was able to place data near customers, meet survival goals for regional failures, and deliver fast access with 40–80 ms round-trip latency for its substrate layer. The platform now runs critical control-plane services, RBAC, authentication, and a 2 TB query history table on CockroachDB, helping Starburst scale reliably across regions and clouds.

Starburst

Ken Pickering

VP of Engineering