Ahana Launches Cloud-Native Managed Service For Presto

The big data startup also expanded its seed funding with an additional $2.3 million from Lux Capital and GV.

Startup Ahana this week launched its Presto-as-a-Service offering that’s designed to simplify the use and management of the Presto SQL query engine and speed the adoption of the open-source big data technology.

Ahana also announced that the San Mateo, Calif.-based company had raised an additional $2.3 million in seed funding, bringing its total financing to $4.8 million.

“This is the easiest way to get up and running on Presto and also to manage and maintain it,” said Dipti Borkar, chief product officer at Ahana and one of the company’s co-founders, in an interview with CRN about the new Ahana Cloud for Presto managed service.

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Presto is an open-source, high-performance SQL query engine, originally developed at Facebook, for speeding up database queries from a variety of distributed data sources – a key issue for business analytics tasks that involve huge volumes of data.

Ahana, which exited stealth in June, began offering the Linux Foundation’s PrestoDB federated SQL query engine through the Amazon Web Services marketplace in July. The new Ahana Cloud for Presto managed service is the company’s first commercial product.

The cloud-native Ahana Cloud for Presto service will make it simpler for businesses and organizations to deploy and manage Presto and integrate the SQL query engine with databases, data catalogs and data lake systems running on AWS, said CEO and co-founder Steven Mih in the interview with CRN.

Ahana Cloud for Presto is specifically built for AWS customers, allowing cloud and data platform managers to provide self-service SQL query capabilities for analysts and data scientists. Ahana Cloud for Presto can tap into AWS data sources such as Amazon S3, Amazon Elasticsearch, and Amazon Relational Database System (Amazon RDS) for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and others. The service utilizes containers and the Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS).

“That’s the beauty of Presto. It has open interfaces and open formats,” Borkar said, saying that makes it easy to connect additional data sources to the system and manage multi-cluster deployments.

Ahana Cloud for Presto can be integrated with any business intelligence or dashboarding tool or data science notebook, according to the company. The service includes the Ahana Console for creating, deploying and managing multi-cluster compute planes, uses a built-in hosted Hive Metastore to manage metadata, and provides a range of security capabilities.

Ahana Cloud for Presto is procured with Pay-As-You-Go pricing in the AWS Marketplace, priced according to usage, and deployed within a user’s AWS account.

Cloud data warehouse systems, such as Snowflake and AWS Redshift, have been in the news lately with Snowflake’s much trumpeted IPO earlier this month. Mih and Borkar said the new Ahana managed service offering is an alternative “disaggregated analytics stack” to cloud data warehouses because Presto integrates data from where it resides – without needing to move or copy the data – while cloud data warehouse systems require moving data from original sources and loading it into the data warehouse.

Ahana Presto for Cloud is currently accepting signups for early access with general availability of the service expected by the end of the year. Initially available for AWS, support for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform will be added in the future.

The additional $2.3 million in funding was provided by new investor Lux Capital and existing investor GV (formerly Google Ventures). Mih said the additional funding will be used to expand Ahana’s product development and technical support teams, as well as begin to build a go-to-market sales and marketing operation.