Ahana Cloud for Presto FAQs
We’ve put together the most frequently asked questions on the Ahana Cloud Community Edition and Ahana Cloud Full Edition.

1. What is the Ahana Cloud Community Edition?
Ahana Cloud Community Edition is the free version of our AWS-based Ahana Cloud for Presto Full Edition offering. You get managed service features to easily run a Presto cluster with your S3 data lake and other data sources. We are providing this to enable everyone with the benefits of Presto for their SQL workloads and to support the growth of the entire Presto community.
2. What are the similarities and differences between downloading the Presto Open Source Software (OSS) and signing up for the Ahana Cloud Community Edition?
Both the open source software and the Ahana Cloud Community Edition are free forever. Ahana Cloud Community Edition is a cloud-based managed service for the open source software, free to use without software charges. The addition of managed service functionality makes it very easy for almost anyone to run Presto, the distributed SQL query engine. It comes with the Ahana Cloud Console, pre-configured cluster settings, better cluster management, and pre-configurations for the data catalog, BI tools, and data sources.
3. Is Ahana Cloud Community Edition really free forever?
Yes. Community Edition is free to use without software charges. The underlying hardware is your responsibility, similar to downloading and running the open source software yourself, you still pay the AWS bill for the virtual machines, or instances, that are running that software.
4. Why do I need to bring my own AWS account after signing up for the Ahana Cloud Community Edition?
Ahana Cloud Community Edition provides a SaaS Console that connects to your AWS Account via a cross-account IAM role. The Presto cluster is deployed into your cloud account where your data is. This is AWS best practices as no data leaves your cloud account.
5. Am I required to pay for Community Edition when I go into Production?
No. You can use the Community Edition for production deployments as well as for learning for free.
6. While the Community Edition managed service is free, what are the typical cloud infrastructure costs?
There are two cost factors, the managed service compute plane has a fixed cost of ~$4 per day in AWS services. The Presto coordinator instance plus cluster of worker instances have a variable AWS instance charge based on the instance-size you choose and the time it is running. For example, if you were to use 5 x m5.large on-demand instances for 8 hours a day, the AWS charges would be roughly 50 cents per hour or ~$4 per day. In total it would be ~$8 per day for the AWS virtual compute services via your AWS bill with no charge for the Ahana managed service. For additional questions, feel free to ask in the Ahana Community Slack Channel.
7. How is the software provided as part of a Full Edition Subscription different from Ahana Cloud Community Edition? Is it identical to the open source version of Presto?
The free Community Edition is provided by Ahana Cloud, Inc. as a service to the community. It gives you a managed service and a set of binaries that enables you to build a data lakehouse platform that includes basic availability, performance, and tooling capabilities. The Full Edition represents the latest and most stable production-ready release and provides enterprise-grade deployment of Presto including an unlimited number of clusters that can autoscale up or down, better price-performance, and advanced security. The Full Edition also includes extensive QA testing, bug fixes, customer hot fixes and technical support. For more information on Ahana Cloud editions please see the Getting Started page.
8. How is community support different from the commercial support provided as a part of an Ahana Cloud for Presto Full Edition?
Community support is provided by the community via the Ahana Cloud Community Slack. Ahana Cloud, Inc.’s technical support personnel and engineers monitor the slack channels from time to time but Full Edition paid customers are their top priority. Paid Full Edition support is provided by technical support personnel and engineering based on the Service Level Agreement associated with the particular level of support (e.g. Standard, Platinum Plus) purchased. For more information on our support policy please see the Ahana Support Tiers page on our website. Custom service level agreements are also available.
9. Can I upgrade from the Community Edition level to the Full Edition level?
Yes, it’s easy to do so. From Community Edition is it simple to move to a Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) Full Edition via the AWS Marketplace. Please contact sales at hello@ahana.io.
Note: Even if you upgrade to a trial or full product, any existing Community Edition Presto Cluster will continue to remain free until it is destroyed.
10. Can a customer use the Full Edition to evaluate the product?
Yes, customers can use the Full Edition free-of-charge for 14-days with technical support provided.
11. Presto can federate with various data sources, which ones are available in Ahana Cloud?
When your data has not reached the Data Lake, you can federate data sources but note the performance may be lower than expected. Ahana Cloud for Presto supports Hive/S3, Glue/S3, RDS MySQL, RDS PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, and Redshift. Other connectors can be added in the Full Edition by contacting hello@ahana.io.
12. What Public Cloud Service Providers do you currently support?
Ahana Cloud for Presto is available in AWS at this time. Other cloud providers will be supported in the future. The Presto Open Source Software (OSS) is available to be installed in any environment, on-prem or the cloud.