AetherLake vs Starburst Data Platform

AetherLake is a Kubernetes-native data lakehouse that brings storage, catalog, federated SQL, streaming, orchestration, BI, and identity into a web control panel. Its stack includes MinIO, Trino, Apache Polaris, Kafka, Flink, dbt, Airflow, Superset, Spark, Milvus, Prometheus, Grafana, PostgreSQL, and Keycloak. The panel shows pod health and resource use, supports service restarts, and provides workspaces for dbt, Kafka, Flink SQL, Trino queries, and Iceberg catalogs. Kafka and Flink are enabled by default; project examples describe streaming Kafka data into Iceberg tables and querying topics through Trino. Keycloak supplies OIDC single sign-on across services, with data-admin, data-scientist, and data-engineer roles. Deployment prerequisites include Kubernetes, Helm 3.12 or later, kubectl, Docker, and an NGINX ingress controller. Deployment materials cover AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. An MCP server gives AI assistants access to platform status, logs and restarts, Trino queries, Polaris catalogs, and Airflow DAGs. The control panel is bilingual in English and Turkish. Internal, evaluation, development, testing, and non-commercial use is free; commercial use requires a separate license.

Starburst Data Platform is built on Trino and Apache Iceberg to provide governed access to distributed data across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. It can query data across 50+ sources in one SQL statement without copying it. Connectors span data lakes, warehouses, streaming systems, relational databases, and other sources, with features including parallelism, table statistics, dynamic filtering, and pushdown. Starburst Galaxy is available on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Galaxy controls include SSO, SCIM, service principals, role- and attribute-based access control, row filters, column masking, and end-to-end encryption. Starburst says Galaxy does not store customer data. Its free tier includes up to three clusters for ad hoc queries. The 30-day trial includes $500 in Galaxy compute resources and Enterprise features, then downgrades to the free tier. Paid plans start at $0.50 per credit; the listed Enterprise and Mission-Critical tiers start at $0.75 and $1.00 per credit. The Galaxy security page lists a 99.5% uptime SLA, 24/7 expert support, and a 30-minute response time.