Apache Kudu is an open-source distributed data storage engine for analytics on fast-changing data. Like most modern analytic data stores, it organises its data by column rather than by row, and it is designed to make fast analytics on fast and changing data easy. The project's documentation describes its use with Impala and Spark, so that data can be processed immediately upon arrival. Kudu is delivered as software that runs on a cluster of servers the organisation operates itself.
Kudu is a top-level project of the Apache Software Foundation, a U.S. 501(c)(3) charitable organisation, and is released under the Apache License 2.0. It has no commercial owner or foreign parent company. A European organisation can run Kudu on its own servers in the EU, and the location of its data then follows that deployment. It offers an open-source option for teams that currently rely on proprietary real-time analytic stores. Commercial services built on Kudu are offered by other companies whose ownership and hosting arrangements should be checked separately.