Celebrating 5 Years of Stackable: Past, Present & Future
Celebrating five years of...
Our Retrospective
Five years ago, we set out with a clear vision: to make data platforms open, fair, and future-ready. Born in a shared apartment during the pandemic, Stackable began as a bold idea shared by two open-source enthusiasts. Today, we’ve grown into an international team of innovators, turning that vision into reality.
Together with our customers and partners, we’ve built the Stackable Data Platform (SDP) – a fully modular, Kubernetes-native solution that empowers organizations in finance, healthcare, and beyond to create secure, scalable, and transparent data landscapes. From our first lines of code to becoming a trusted name in open-source data infrastructure, our journey has been driven by a commitment to flexibility, security, and community.
This following timeline looks back at how we got here – from our humble beginnings to our latest milestones – and closes with a glimpse of what’s to come.
TL;DR: we’re just getting started…
Milestones at a Glance
Disclaimer: In the spirit of keeping this timeline shorter than our coffee breaks, we’ve had to cherry-pick highlights. So if your favorite moment, project, customer, partner or office legend didn’t make the cut, don’t worry: it’s not personal, it’s just math (and maybe a little bit of chaos). Absence here does not equal absence of awesomeness. Consider this a ‘greatest hits’ album, not the full discography. And now, let’s celebrate!
At a meeting in the DB Tower, Lars Francke and Sönke Liebau together with customers of a competitor envisioned Stackable: a to empower businesses with flexible, secure, and transparent data architectures. Their shared passion for open-source solutions and years of collaboration - from school to consulting - laid the foundation for Stackable’s mission.
Stackable was officially founded during the pandemic, with its date of entry in the commercial register on 30.09.2020. Development of the Stackable Data Platform (SDP) beginning in a shared apartment of Lars & Sönke (not garage 😉).
With Razvan (photo) coming on board as our first developer, Stefan joining as COO and Sebastian stepping in as investor and CEO, Lars and Sönke could dedicate their full attention to product development and business strategy.
In the following years we grew to almost 20 people working for Stackable today.
Throughout the year 2021 private investors got on board at Stackable. The biggest of them: IONOS.
The IONOS Beteiligungsparty marked a pivotal moment, and when Sönke’s online participation was briefly disrupted by an internet outage, it underscored the importance of stability - a core value that Stackable embodies and delivers.
The growing team gathered in Hamburg for the first in-person meeting. Plus, we also incorporated Stackable UK. Besides team building, we continued to work hard - also on our public funding we received earlier in the year from BMWK for the Gaia-X project Marispace-X.
In June we celebrated the official launch of SDP with the 22.06 release.
Together with IONOS we earned the prestigious (?) ECN award Award for best cooperation project.
Photo: this 3D-printed timeline masterpiece created by one of our employees, displays Stackable’s commit activity from 2020 to 2023, where each column represents a year and every block within it a month, visually capturing the density and growth of our team’s contributions over time!
Releases included:
SDP 23.1 introduced image selection and logging controls, SDP 23.4 added affinity settings and health checks, SDP 23.7 delivered a major release with comprehensive operator updates for Airflow, Kafka, Trino, and more, and SDP 23.11 enhanced security with OPA-based authentication and new features for Apache NiFi, Spark, and Trino.
We launched a comprehensive security initiative, focusing on supply chain security, daily vulnerability scans, compliance with the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), and alignment with frameworks like SLSA and CSAF, while also becoming an active contributor to the CVE program to enhance platform resilience and trust. This initiative reinforced Stackable’s commitment to secure, transparent, and compliant data platforms.
The Stackable team gathered in Karlsruhe for our quarterly on-prem week, blending productive sessions - planning the next platform release, launching an AI initiative, and slashing container build times - with a fun evening at the RetroGames e.V. museum playing classic arcade games.
SDP 24.3 introduced OPA-based authentication and centralized Active Directory integration, SDP 24.7 added ARM64 support and OpenID Connect (OIDC) integration, and SDP 24.11 delivered flexibility, performance, and security improvements, including a 75% reduction in vulnerabilities.
Lars began to shape the future of software security as part of the EU CRA expert group. He was appointed as the expert for open source among Big Tech players.
We became an authorized CVE Numbering Authority (CNA), joining just 23 companies in Germany.
Additionally, DATEN:RAUM:FREIBURG, Germany’s first urban data platform based on Stackable, went live in Freiburg, showcasing our commitment to smart city innovation.
Stackable Facts
Dive into some numbers, because it’s the details that make Stackable more than just a platform – we believe it’s also some kind of a movement. And because even game-changing tech deserves a little show-and-tell, here are some facts:
Growth & network
From 2 founders in 2020 to a team of 17+ highly talented colleagues today. Supported by a network of 28 partners (and growing).
Also, let’s cherish the countless events – online and offline – that kept our energy alive.
Community impact
Still small, but everyone is beautiful: our almost 2k followers on LinkedIn.
Our Discord community currently has around 240 members, and the same goes for our beloved newsletter subscribers.
Tech development
Until now, for developing Stackable, we have opened about 3,8k tickets in total. Adding to these, we have received some 250 customer issues, which we work on with higher priority and special ❤️.
Global footprint
Our users and customers come from all over the 🌍: Germany, Switzerland, the UK, the USA, South Africa, Malaysia, and even as far away as New Zealand. The same is true for our beloved partners.
People and Culture
Behind every release stands a great team that values openness, collaboration and curiosity.
Whether at conferences, in remote stand-ups or during on-site events from Karlsruhe to Hamburg and Munich, Stackable thrives on shared ideas and a strong community spirit.
With that being said… a heartfelt thank-you to every past & present Stackable colleague whose dedication, creativity and team spirit has shaped these first five years and made our journey possible!
Some voices:
Community & Events
From Berlin Buzzwords to DOAG and many other conferences, Stackable has been an active voice in the open-source world.
Presentations, workshops and countless community discussions have helped shape our platform and inspire new features.
Finally, the biggest thank you goes to...
…all of our highly-valued customers, partners and the open-source community: thank you for five incredible years of trust, feedback and collaboration!
Without your support, our journey would not have been possible. Your insights and engagement have shaped the Stackable Data Platform and helped it grow into a solution that organisations can rely on worldwide.
Looking ahead - The next five years!
These first five years were just the beginning.
Our mission remains clear: to empower organisations to build secure, composable and future-ready data platforms which are fully open source and free from vendor lock-in.
In the next chapter we will expand our platform, strengthen our community and continue to push the boundaries of what open data platforms can achieve. Join us along the way “in whatever shape or form” (to cite Sönke)…
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