Ahana Cloud Inc., the commercial curator of the Presto distributed query engine, today announced a cloud-native offering of Presto as a service on the Amazon Web Services Inc. cloud.

The company also said it raised an additional $2.3 million in seed financing, coming on top of the $2.5 million it raised in June.

Presto is an open-source distributed SQL query engine that’s known for its ability to query multiple sources — including those containing both structured and unstructured data — and return results without requiring extract databases or extract/transform/load procedures. Originally built by Facebook Inc., it was released to open source in 2015 and is incubated by the Presto Foundation as a project within the Linux Foundation.

Ahana announced a version of Presto on the Amazon cloud and Docker Inc.’s Docker Hub three months ago, but that machine image was effectively a placeholder for the managed service.

“Back in June we put the software into the marketplace as installed software and offered paid support,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Steven Mih (pictured, left). “This is our first product offering.” Although the company made some changes to enable as-a-service functionality, the base code is open-source Presto.

The goal of the cloud native service is to address Presto’s inherent complexity. Although the software simplifies queries across multiple data sources, “there is a lot of expertise required to run, configure and manage it,” said Dipti Borkar (pictured right), Ahana’s co-founder and chief product officer. “A simple thing like adding a data source requires a file to be created and a cluster restarted. That can be complicated for platform teams.”

The new version sports cloud native features like massive scalability, deployment within software containers and pay-as-you-go pricing. “It’s very easy to deploy clusters and manage them,” Borkar said. “When you create a Presto cluster and a table it goes into the S3 bucket by default. You don’t have to attach it or write a properties file. If that Presto cluster goes away, you still have your data.”

The service is fully integrated with other required elements, including the Hive metastore, data lake and Apache Superset visualization engine. It runs in containers and uses the Kubernetes container orchestrator but requires no knowledge of Kubernetes to deploy or manage, Borkar said. Although the Hive metastore – which maps files to tables and columns – is included, users can import their own metadata catalogs if they choose, Borkar said.

The choice of AWS as the first cloud platform might seem puzzling given that Google LLC’s GV Management Co. LLC venture arm invested in both funding rounds, but Mih explained that “GV is fairly autonomous. They know they’re not going to drive product strategy.” Ahana said it intends to offer Presto as a service on the Microsoft Corp. and Google clouds in the future.

Applications for early access can be made concurrent with the PrestoCon virtual event on Thursday. General availability is expected by the end of the year

In addition to the funding, Ahana announced the addition of three new co-founders to its ranks. They include engineers with prior experience running Presto at Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Walmart Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc. as well as building the Vertica analytic DBMS now owned by Micro Focus International plc.

Photo: Ahana