Users have complete control over multi-cluster compute.
I had the opportunity to catch up with Steven Mih, Cofounder and CEO, and Dipti Borkar, Cofounder and Chief Product Officer at Ahana three months after the launch of their company. Ahana is focused on bringing PrestoDB-based analytics to market so companies can get insights from a broad range of data in a timely manner.
A resurgence of cloud software has led to an increase in funding. Ahana just expanded its seed funding with an investment from Lux Capital while expanding their professional team with three new cofounders from Uber, Walmart, and Alibaba.
As companies become more data-driven, they consume more data from more sources. Data sets reside in data lakes and non-relational systems need to run analytical workloads and get fast results. This can be a people problem given the technical complexity of Presto. That’s why it’s valuable to make it easier to get up to speed and operate multiple clusters.
Ahana Cloud for Presto service is built specifically for AWS users and enables 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 uses containers, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and is easily procured with Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) pricing in AWS Marketplace.
More than 200 properties need to be configured in Presto. There’s no built-in metadata catalog, object storage, or preconfiguration. Ahana addresses these challenges by providing a self-service analytics platform that’s fully integrated to take compute to the data in the users’ environment. Running on Kubernetes with the ability to bring your own metadata and BI tools.
Users can be up and running in 15 minutes versus one week in one or more clusters. An integrated data lake is part of every cluster. Provide the credentials and it simplifies set-up and operation.
Presto in the cloud enables visibility into cluster consoles so admins can know what’s running in order to optimize performance and costs. Lower complexity results in more uses. Anyone with an AWS account can run Presto. Ahana enables thousands of analysts to make data-driven decisions.
”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. ”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
"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 the potential to offer users a fast, federated, OSS-based analytics solution with an intuitive UI that helps to simplify ramp up and ongoing operations."
“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.”