Facebook, Uber, Twitter and Alibaba form Presto Foundation to Tackle Distributed Data Processing at Scale

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 23, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced that Presto, the widely adopted interactive data query engine, will be hosted under the Linux Foundation. The newly-established Presto Foundation will have an open and neutral governance model that will enable Presto to scale and diversify its community. Founding members include Facebook, Alibaba, Twitter and Uber, who will use the foundation to enable contributors to drive the future direction of the project, helping Presto become the fastest and most reliable SQL engine for massively distributed data processing. 

Presto was developed at Facebook in 2012 as a high-performance distributed SQL query engine for large scale data analytics. Presto's architecture allows users to query a variety of data sources such as Hadoop, S3, Alluxio, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Kafka, MongoDB and move at scale and speed. It solves the problem of having to choose between having fast analytics that use an expensive commercial solution or using a slow but "free" solution that requires excessive hardware.

"Presto has been designed for high performance exabyte-scale data processing on a large number of machines. Its flexible design allows processing data from a wide variety of data sources. From day one Presto has been designed with efficiency, scalability, and reliability in mind, and it has been improved over the years to take on additional use cases at Facebook, such as batch and other application specific interactive use cases," said Nezih Yigitbasi, Engineering Manager of Presto at Facebook.

"At Facebook alone, over a thousand employees use Presto, running several million queries and processing petabytes of data per day. After creating Presto we open sourced it to see if other companies were having the same issues and wanted to collaborate. It turns out many other companies were interested and so under The Linux Foundation, we believe the project can engage others and grow the community for the benefit of all," said Kathy Kam, Head of Open Source at Facebook.

"The Linux Foundation is excited to work with the Presto community, collaborating to solve the increasing problem of massive distributed data processing at internet scale," said Michael Dolan, VP of Strategic Programs at the Linux Foundation.

Presto Foundation will operate under a community governance model with representation from each of the founding members. With this evolution Facebook will be collaborating with the broader ecosystem of users and contributors as one voice in the future of the Foundation.

Presto is a distributed system designed to run on large clusters of machines. It can query data where it is stored without needing to move the data to a separate system. Its in-memory and distributed query processing results in query latencies of seconds to minutes.

Additional quotes

"Uber's data platform architecture uses Presto to extract critical insights from aggregated data, which helps us build better products for our customers," says Brian Hsieh, Head of Open Source at Uber. "Uber is honored to partner with the Linux Foundation and major contributors from the tech community to bring the Presto Foundation to life. Our goal is to help create an open and collaborative community in which Presto developers can thrive." 

"Alibaba Group is pleased to participate in this exciting project of the Linux Foundation, with our abundant business scenarios as well as the talented developer team," says Liang Lin, Senior Director of Alibaba OLAP products. "We believe the collaboration would eventually benefit both the community as well as Alibaba and our customers."

For more information please visit http://prestodb.github.io/

About The Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world's leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation's projects are critical to the world's infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation's methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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