Apache Druid Turns 10: The Untold Origin Story

Druid, a distributed, in-memory OLAP data store, was introduced a decade ago by Eric Tschetter at Metamarkets after existing database solutions failed to meet the company's need for real-time analytics on large datasets. Initially met with skepticism, Druid has since been open-sourced and widely adopted by major companies like Netflix, Lyft, and eBay for its ability to handle fast data scans and operational simplicity. Tschetter developed Druid as a background project, replacing Metamarkets' HBase cluster with Druid's first service in 2011, which has since processed over 100 trillion events. The success of Druid underscores the potential impact of innovative software architecture, encouraging others to pursue bold ideas in technology development.