Serverless streaming database platform startup DeltaStream emerged from cover today, armed with $10 million from a seed funding round led by New Enterprise Associates.
The company has built a serverless streaming database to manage, secure and process data streams. The “serverless” aspect refers to the way the platform abstracts the underlying infrastructure, allowing developers to interact with the platform without tinkering with computer servers.
DeltaStream is part of the real-time computing game, an area that is critical to businesses today. It’s real-time data that allows companies to provide instant product recommendations while someone is strolling through a mall, for example. It also allows financial institutions to detect and block fraudulent transactions the moment they are attempted.
Most companies rely on cloud-based data streaming platforms like Apache Kafka or Amazon Kinesis to power such applications. These platforms continuously collect vast amounts of live data streaming in from hundreds or even thousands of different sources. It is this data that helps run real-time applications that can process and respond to events with minimal latency.
Implementing all this real-time data streaming is a major struggle for all but the most powerful organizations. It requires a team of developers who understand distributed systems and have knowledge of data management. At the same time, this team must work around the clock, provisioning servers and clusters to ensure delivery guarantees, fault tolerance, and elasticity. The same team must also keep the entire system running 24 hours a day.
DeltaStream says all of this is a huge drain on development teams. The serverless database is designed to manage, secure and process all the data streams it ingests. Essentially, it provides a compute layer on top of streaming storage systems like Kafka and Kinesis. With DeltaStream, it becomes possible to read data from one or more services, perform calculations and analysis on this information, and then write the results across different storage sources in real time.
Hojjat Jafarpour, DeltaStream’s founder and chief executive, told VentureBeat that his company’s platform makes it easy to build real-time streaming applications and pipelines in the familiar structured query language. “The solution is serverless, which means users only have to focus on building their applications and pipelines,” he said. “DeltaStream takes care of the operations, complete with scaling up and down, fault tolerance and isolation.”
The main benefit is that developers can simply get on with their work, safe in the knowledge that they have the resources needed to run their applications. Additionally, the simplicity of SQL makes it easy to manage, secure, and query data on the move. Finally, DeltaStream also organizes data streams into schemas and databases, and provides role-based access control to ensure the confidentiality of the information flowing through it.
DeltaStream’s deployment of the compute layer on top of users’ streaming storage systems, the company says in a blog post, eliminates the need for data duplication and doesn’t add unnecessary latency to real-time applications and pipelines.
DeltaStream announced that its platform is available in private beta on Amazon Web Services starting today. The company will use funds from today’s round to build out the capabilities of its platform and extend it to Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure before it becomes generally available.
