Ahana Unveils First Cloud-native Managed Service for Presto on AWS

Ahana, the self-service analytics company for Presto, announced today its new Presto-as-a-Service offering designed to simplify the deployment, management and integration of Presto, an open source distributed SQL query engine, with data catalogs, databases and data lakes on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Ahana Cloud for Presto is the only easy-to-use, cloud-native managed service for Presto, and is deployed within the user’s AWS account, giving customers complete control and visibility of clusters and their data.

Also today, in a separate announcement, Ahana increased its seed funding to $4.8 million with the additional funding led by Lux Capital and expanded its technical team with three new cofounders adding top Presto and core database talent from Uber, Walmart and Alibaba.

The Ahana Cloud for Presto service, built specifically for AWS users, allows cloud and data platform teams to provide self-service, SQL analytics for their organization’s analysts and scientists. As a cloud-native solution, Ahana Cloud for Presto utilizes containers, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and is easily procured with Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) pricing in AWS Marketplace.  

”While Presto is one of the fastest-growing open source projects in data analytics, it is still a complicated distributed data system with extensive tuning and integration required. This tends to make Presto deployments expensive and achievable mostly by large Internet companies like Facebook, Uber and Twitter,” said Dipti Borkar, Cofounder and Chief Product Officer, Ahana. ”Organizations increasingly need self-service SQL analytics, and Ahana Cloud for Presto can now simplify and unify data analytics so users can query data directly in place across a range of data sources on AWS including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and others  – without the need to move or copy the data.”

“I’ve been following the Ahana team and they are addressing my challenges of building in the cloud,” said Cal Mitchell, Database Engineer, TimeTrade. “Ahana Cloud for Presto on AWS would save me hours and days of time across the configuration, deployment and operations lifecycle. It is as easy as a cloud data warehouse but without copying all my data into it. This would allow me to innovate features instead of managing infrastructure. It would give me what I love about Presto with little operational complexity.”

 Ahana Cloud for Presto offers the following:

• Easy-to-use Ahana Console for creation, deployment and management of a multi-cluster compute plane developed with the emerging best practice of an in-virtual private cloud (VPC) deployment on AWS
• Support for Amazon S3, Amazon RDS for MySQL, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, and others
• Built-in hosted Hive Metastore that manages metadata for data stored in Amazon S3 data lakes
• Support for user-managed Hive Metastores and Amazon Glue
• Range of security capabilities including fully protected compute plane
• Cloud-native highly scalable and available containerized environment deployed on Amazon EKS
• Integration with any business intelligence and dashboarding tool or data science notebook

“We are thrilled to be working with Ahana and applaud their AWS customer-first approach,” said Bob Wise, General Manager, Kubernetes, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “Traditionally, accessing and analyzing their data has been a highly complex issue for customers. Ahana has leveraged containers to simplify this process and with Ahana Cloud’s in-VPC deployment with Amazon EKS, customers can greatly simplify their Presto deployments and analyze data on Amazon S3-based data lakes and other AWS database services, while reducing operational costs.”

“Companies want ad hoc SQL analytics to enable faster data-driven innovation, but with data increasingly spread across multiple data lakes and databases in the cloud, there is just too much complexity,” said Mike Leone, senior analyst, ESG. “Ahana’s cloud native managed service for Presto has potential to offer users a fast, federated, OSS-based analytics solution with an intuitive UI that helps to simplify ramp up and ongoing operations.”

PrestoDB – The Federated SQL Query Engine

PrestoDB is a federated SQL query engine for data engineers and analysts to run interactive, ad hoc analytics on large amounts of data, which continues to grow exponentially across a wide range of data lakes and databases. As a result, data platform teams are increasingly using Presto as the de facto SQL query engine to run analytics across data sources in-place, without the need to move data. One of the fastest growing projects in the data analytics space, PrestoDB is hosted by the Linux Foundation’s Presto Foundation and is the same project running at massive scale at Facebook, Uber and Twitter. PrestoSQL, with a similar name but a different offering, is a fork that was announced in 2019.

Availability and Pricing

Ahana Cloud for Presto is now accepting sign ups here and early access is available concurrent with PrestoCon on Thursday, September 24.  General availability is expected by the end of the year. The service will initially be available for AWS, with support for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud to be added in the future. Ahana Cloud for Presto will be elastically priced based on usage, with Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) and annual options via AWS Marketplace.