2020 Recap – A Year with Presto

    By: 

    Dipti Borkar, Cofounder at Ahana

    Tl;dr: 2020 was a huge year for the Presto community. We held our first major conference, PrestoCon, the biggest Presto event ever. We had a massive expansion of our meetup groups with more than 20 sessions held throughout the year, and significant innovations were contributed to Presto!

    This year has certainly been unique, to say the least. As chairperson of the Presto Foundation Outreach Committee, the term “outreach” took on a whole new meaning this year. But through the challenges of 2020, we adopted new ways to connect. We continued to build and engage with the Presto community in a new “virtual” way, and I couldn’t be more proud of all we’ve accomplished as a community in 2020.

    So what did the Presto Foundation do in 2020?

    Here are some of the things we accomplished:

    Presto Meetups

    In April, we kicked off our monthly virtual meetup series and grew our meetup group to almost 1,000 people. We had talks from Presto users like LinkedIn, Jampp, Walmart, Apache Hudi, AWS, Ahana, Upsolver, Alluxio, and Amundsen and learned how these companies are solving real problems with Presto. We also got an inside look at some of the key Presto technological innovations from Presto engineers at Facebook, Uber, and Twitter.

    Additionally, we organized Presto meetup groups in New York City, London, and Sydney (if you’re local to those areas, we encourage you to join!).

    I’m excited to connect with even more Presto users in 2021 through our meetup groups. Hopefully, we’ll be able to meet in person next year 🙂

    PrestoCon 2020

    We hosted a virtual PrestoCon in September, the largest ever Presto event with nearly 600 registrations. Similar to KubeCon, PrestoCon will be the marquee event for Presto every year. There were 20 sessions on topics like the Presto technology roadmap, the Presto ecosystem, and how users like Uber, Alibaba, Pinterest, Twitter, Agari, and JD.com use Presto in production. The event was a true testament to how strong the Presto community is and how much it is growing.

    I can’t wait to see what will be showcased at the next one. Keep an eye out for our next event in early 2021!

    Major innovations in PrestoDB

    Some of the major innovations merged in and coming up were presented at PrestoCon. Project Aria dramatically improved table scan performance by 2-3x. One of the biggest challenges in Presto – the single coordinator is yet another challenge that is being solved by separating the resource manager and adding multiple coordinators. Another popular feature that’s seen a lot of interest in the community is the support for UDFs.

    And the biggest innovation yet that will take Presto performance to the next level is the rewrite of the Presto worker from Java to C++. Anyone who has been in the database world and understands performance implications of the language that a query engine is written in will appreciate the order of magnitude performance improvement that this switch will bring to Presto.

    More user contributions to prestodb.io

    We improved the user experience for prestodb.io with new Introduction to Presto and Getting Started pages. We also had the most user-contributed blogs ever. EA, Alibaba, Drift and Vistaprint) shared their Presto use cases. Other users contributed how-to blogs like Getting Started with Presto and Aria Scan Optimizations, Even Faster Unnest, PrestoDB and Apache Hudi, and many more.

    Presto Foundation

    Presto Foundation has now become an industry consortium. Similar to CNCF that hosts Kubernetes, we hope to see Presto Foundation with Presto grow with more end-users, vendors, and innovators joining the foundation! We had 3 new companies join the Presto Foundation earlier this year: Ahana, Upsolver, and Intel. We also look forward to working with Starburst, who has recently joined Presto Foundation as well. As the interest in and usage of Presto continues to grow, the companies that make up the foundation will help to drive even more developer awareness and engagement of the Presto technology.

    So as you can see, we’ve been busy! I couldn’t be happier with the progress we made as a community in 2020, and I’m looking forward to all we have planned in 2021. By the way, if you want to stay connected with the Presto community, join our mailing list, where we’ll be sending out updates on new content, meetups, conferences, and more.

    Cheers to a new year and the next stage of Presto!

    Dipti Borkar, Chairperson

    On behalf of the Presto Foundation Outreach Committee