2023: A Breakthrough Year for Onehouse and the Universal Data Lakehouse 

In this holiday season, we at Onehouse want to take this opportunity to thank our community of customers, open source users, and partners for an amazing year. 2023 has been a whirlwind year of learning, growth, and exciting announcements for us. This blog post cites the highlights and also encapsulates much of the Onehouse story in one place. 

To understand this year and its impact, you can begin with our unveiling of the Universal Data Lakehouse architecture (UDL) as a fundamental change in data management. This architecture, which puts the lakehouse at the center of data analytics, is emerging as a standard in companies large and small, and Onehouse is helping to lead the way. 

Onehouse was founded by Vinoth Chandar, who created Apache Hudi, the first data lakehouse (with a robust services layer) at Uber in 2015. Our founding vision is to build an open and interoperable Universal Data Lakehouse, allowing you to free your data from data platform lock-in.. 

The Onehouse lakehouse makes it easy to:

• Ingest data quickly and reliably from streaming and batch sources with fast data freshness on the order of minutes
• Store data centrally using your table format of choice (Apache Hudi, Apache Iceberg, and/or Delta Lake) on cost-effective cloud storage, while continually optimizing your tables for performance and cost-efficiency
• Make your data easy to query by processing engines such as Databricks, Spark, and Snowflake SQL, so you can efficiently support all of your organization’s use cases

Onehouse is delivered as a fully managed cloud service, providing the fastest path to deploying a lakehouse while reducing the operating burden on your data engineering teams. And we keep your data secure in your own virtual private cloud (VPC), so that your data never has to leave your account.

Our product vision is supported by a strong investment in open source software and communities. Onehouse has the founder of the Apache Hudi project, CEO Vinoth Chandar, and many maintainers and contributors, all contributing to the recent release of Hudi 0.14 and the specs for the upcoming Hudi 1.0. In addition, we’re very excited about the new OneTable project. OneTable allows you to write to and read from any table format, avoiding lock-in to a single format. Gone are the days of having to make painful trade-offs between projects when creating and deploying a new lakehouse.

In 2023 we took significant steps towards building our vision. Here are seven of the top highlights for the year, across product, open source, and communities:

1. Hudi releases. Hudi 0.14 was released in October, with Record Level Index first in the list of new features. And we got a Hudi 1.0 preview at the Summit. 
2. OneTable announced. OneTable was announced in February and committed to open source in November (led by Google, Microsoft, and Onehouse), as shared at the Summit. 
3. Open Data Stack partnerships. Onehouse established technology partnerships with Confluent (July), Starburst (August), and Celerdata (September), important partners in building the Open Data Stack.
4. Architecture. In January, Onehouse published a widely read, detailed comparison of the three leading lakehouse projects: Hudi, Apache Iceberg, and Delta Lake. And in October we published an accessible summary of the Universal Data Lakehouse architecture. 
5. Customer adoption. Adoption of the Onehouse managed service increased throughout the year. For example, careers site Apna launched their analytics platform based on Onehouse; see the Medium blog (January), Summit talk (November), and Onehouse blog (December).  
6. Open Source Data Summit. The November launch of this new virtual conference drew thousands of registrants to dozens of sessions – all available now on-demand. Hits included Vinoth Chandar’s keynote and the data architecture mega-panel with Confluent, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Starburst, and Uber.
7. Funding. In February, Onehouse announced seed funding of $8M and received Series A funding of $25M led by Addition and Greylock. The funding has allowed us to expand our engineering team and accelerate our roadmap.

What do we expect to see in 2024? We are looking at the completion of Hudi 1.0; major improvements in the Onehouse managed service; a bigger and better Open Source Data Summit 2.0; and much more, along with an increasing focus on the Universal Data Lakehouse architecture. Stay tuned, and we look forward to sharing more with you in the New Year!