Hi HN, there’s a distinct lack of modern self-hosted scale-out query engines. A lot of the innovation in the last 10 years has been in SaaS-only systems. That’s also been true for Firebolt until now. We’re now taking the radical step of offering our query engine as a Docker image that’s free for commercial use without any real restrictions on what you can use it for (basically everything except competing with our SaaS offering). There are helm charts and docker compose files in the repo as well to help you get started.

The focus of Firebolt is on low-latency, high-concurrency analytics like you might have them in user-facing workloads (dashboards, data-heavy apps, ...). To show just how fast it is, we submitted Core to ClickBench and instantly took the top spot: https://benchmark.clickhouse.com/. But Firebolt isn’t just a query accelerator, it can also handle scale-out ETL/ELT and all the other things you might want to use a data warehouse for.

I’ve been working on Core for the last few months, and moshap (our CTO), wagjamin (VP Eng) and I are here for your questions. Mosha and Benjamin have written about our motivations to offer Core on the company blog: https://www.firebolt.io/blog/introducing-firebolt-core