PrestoCon and Growing Industry Consortium – Intel and Upsolver Join Presto Foundation

    By: 

    Girish Baliga, Chair, Presto Foundation and Director of Engineering at Uber

    Presto Foundation joined the Linux Foundation over a year ago, and has been focused on growing the Presto open source project and community. We encourage industry involvement with an open charter, clear guiding principles, and community-oriented goals. We recently hosted PrestoCon 2020, our first annual community conference, which was widely attended and well represented by Presto community members. We also warmly welcome Intel and Upsolver who recently joined the Presto Foundation.

    By way of quick introduction, I’m Girish Baliga, the newly elected Presto Foundation Governing Board Chair. I manage the Presto team at Uber and have been a contributor and observer at the governing board since the beginning of the foundation. After our successful PrestoCon event – the biggest of its kind – our previous chairperson Brian Hsieh, Head of Open Source at Uber, decided it was time for him to shift his focus on helping ramp up other great open source projects that Uber contributes to the community. I’d like to thank Brian for all his efforts in helping build the Presto community, and I’ll continue to work closely with him.

    Presto Foundation

    The Linux Foundation’s Presto Foundation encourages industry involvement and experience to oversee the Foundation itself and help it grow into an important consortium of organizations over time. Activities include outreach programs like PrestoCon and our monthly virtual meetup series. That said, the Governing Board generally stays clear of the technical aspects of the Presto project, which is handled by the Technical Steering Committee and the Project Committers. Presto Foundation membership is open to all interested organizations. To become a Premier Member, it takes a desire to see the Presto technology and community grow, based on the Foundation charter, which includes these principles:

    • One open, neutral and united Presto community
    • Open, transparent technical leadership and direction
    • No one individual or company is greater than the project and its community

    The Presto Foundation has also posted its goals for the organization.

    PrestoCon 2020

    Two months ago in September, we had a fantastic first-ever PrestoCon 2020 with a record number of attendees. The Linux Foundation did an amazing job managing the virtual conference, at a level you’d expect from an organization that puts on other big shows like KubeCon. To highlight a few happenings of the day, we had TSC Chair Nezih Yigitbasi open the show about all the development in the PrestoDB community and Biswa Chattopadhyaya, Chief Architect for Data at Facebook, close the day with an inspiring view of the Presto roadmap moving forward. Along with great community talks from Twitter, Alibaba, Pinterest, and JD.com, we saw great sponsor talks from Intel, Ahana, Alluxio, Facebook, Uber, and Starburst. We also saw a community launch announcement by premier member Ahana, with their managed service for Presto, making it easier to run Presto in the Cloud. Thanks to everyone who participated to make PrestoCon the biggest Presto event ever!

    Welcome Intel and Upsolver

    I’m excited to welcome two new Premier Members to the Presto Foundation: Intel and Upsolver. Both are great organizations in their own ways. Everyone knows Intel of course, but some of you may not know that they have a deep Analytics and AI focus. Arijit Bandyopadhyay, CTO of Enterprise Analytics and AI in their Datacenter Group, will be joining as a Governing Board member.

    Upsolver is powering cloud lake houses by simplifying and automating data management. The company specializes in Presto data preparation and is the only officially recommended partner for AWS Athena. Ori Rafael, the co-founder and CEO, will be joining as Governing Board member.

    We started with four founding members: Facebook, Uber, Twitter, and Alibaba. Now, we have doubled the membership to eight and I’m looking forward to seeing the consortium grow even more over the coming years.

    I’m excited about all the plans we have moving forward. Stay tuned for our next big community event in March!

    Girish Baliga,
    Presto Foundation Governing Board Chairperson