Managed Presto in the Cloud – How it Compares to AWS Athena
Deciding between AWS Athena and Ahana Cloud for a managed Presto solution? Learn why Ahana offers a superior Presto experience with predictable pricing, more control over infrastructure, and less vendor lock-in – without sacrificing the agility and self-service that make Presto attractive in the first place.
Explore our case studies to understand how Ahana provides better price performance with more control for the user, or learn more about Athena alternatives.
Athena vs Presto – What Are the Differences?
Athena is based on the Presto source code, but unlike open-source Presto it is a proprietary tool. It is exclusive to the AWS Cloud, relies on pooled resources, and priced per amount of data scanned. Other managed Presto providers such as Ahana provide a higher level of control over costs and compute resources.
Presto is an open-source, interactive query tool
Presto or PrestoDB was developed at Facebook to query massive amounts of data from object storage (such as Hadoop). Today it is maintained by the Presto Foundation and still used at leading tech companies including Twitter and Uber. While Presto is completely open-source, Ahana offers a managed cloud experience.
Amazon Athena is an AWS tool built on Presto.
Athena is a serverless query engine developed by AWS based on open-source PrestoDB. It allows you to run interactive queries without managing infrastructure or servers. Pricing is based on the amount of data processed by each SQL query you run against Amazon S3
Presto at Adroitts
Adroitts’ mission is to build secure, reliable and cost-effective products for their customers. When it comes to data analytics, they must be able to link transactions to respective customers with their profile information to get the full view of the customer. They chose Presto as the underlying query engine to do this.
Leading ISV Adroitts moves to Ahana for Presto for better price performance and scale
5.5X price performance improvement after moving to Ahana Cloud
“Ahana Cloud allows us to scale on demand in a dynamic manner, with no stalling or failing queries (like we had with AWS Athena).“
Presto at Adroitts
Adroitts’ mission is to build secure, reliable and cost-effective products for their customers. When it comes to data analytics, they must be able to link transactions to respective customers with their profile information to get the full view of the customer. They chose Presto as the underlying query engine to do this.
Comparison of AWS Athena to Ahana
AWS Athena
- Hard to run complex queries and scale past a certain point
- Queries can be queued with no control over when
- Very limited concurrency as a result of queue
- Little visibility, control of deployment
Ahana Cloud, Built on Open-Source PrestoDB
- 90% faster with a 10 node cluster, providing greater than 5x price performance comparisons
- Can scale to improve performance to many times faster
- No more failing queries
- More control and visibility into deployment
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AWS Athena FAQ
Why does a single AWS Athena query get stuck in QUEUED state before being executed?
Why am I getting zero records when I use AWS Athena to query a CSV file?