Case Study: BurdaForward achieves real-time analytics performance with StarTree Cloud

BurdaForward Analyzing Quality News Performance Using Real-Time Analytics

BurdaForward, a leading German digital news organization reaching more than 40 million users, needed a real-time analytics platform to consolidate clickstream data from 16 publishers across 100 applications. Using StarTree Cloud, powered by Apache Pinot, they aimed to support editors, advertisers, and consumers with fast, reliable insights while meeting a strict 5–10 ms query SLA.

With StarTree Cloud, BurdaForward replaced Elasticsearch to store more data at a lower cost, enabling week-over-week analysis instead of just a single day of history. StarTree Cloud also improved query reliability, cutting failure rates from 80% during performance testing to 18% and close to zero in production, while giving BurdaForward scalable ingestion, tiered storage, SQL-based querying, and easy dashboarding through Apache Superset.

BurdaForward