Facebook likes to share its toys. Over the years, the company has released the source code and designs for many of its internal projects, allowing the rest of the world to use them, modify them, and build on them—all for free.
Plenty of companies are now releasing open source projects in the hopes that other companies will help improve their software, but Facebook stands out because its projects actually end up being used by so many others. A startup called Datastax built an entire company to support users of Facebook’s database Cassandra, and now even Apple is exploring the use of Facebook’s ambitious server designs in its data centers.
So it’s no surprise that one of Facebook’s newest open source projects, Presto, is winning over outside companies too. Facebook recently released a new version of the big data tool, saying it’s at least twice as fast as previous versions. But even without the new improvements, Presto had already found a home at several other big-name internet operations, including Airbnb, Dropbox, and Netflix.
New big data tools like Hadoop let companies to store and analyze huge amounts of data relatively cheaply and efficiently. But they initially required serious programming chops to use. Presto, in short, lets data analysts use the SQL skills they already have to query data stores in new age systems, such as Hadoop and Cassandra. Plus, it’s much faster than the standard tools for querying Hadoop.
It’s similar in many ways to other open source tools, such as Cloudera’s Impala and MapR’s Drill, which also seek to speed up and simplify Hadoop queries. But one big difference between Facebook and a company like Cloudera and MapR is that Facebook makes tools for its own use, not tools it thinks other companies will want to use. And that means the software Facebook develops has already been battle tested at one of the largest websites in the world before it’s ever even offered up to the rest of the world.
“We added Presto to our suite of data infrastructure tools because it has a track record of production use in a real-world environment,” says Dropbox software engineer Fred Wulff, who points out that the company evaluated several different options.
For Argyle, which offers a fraud detection service for wireless carriers, the tool was a better fit for the company’s needs, says chief marketing officer Ian Howells. And, well, the price was right. “Think back a few years,” Howells says. “If you had to buy a distributed SQL engine that would run on thousands of servers, how much would that have cost if you were to go to Teradata or Oracle? Facebook made it free.”
Of course, unlike Drill or Impala, which are backed by companies whose sole purpose is to develop and support these tools, there’s no commercial support for Presto. But though there aren’t any companies offering commercial support for Presto now, we’ve already seen companies like Datastax and Continuuity emerge to commercialize technology originally developed by Facebook. Don’t be surprised if a Presto company is next.
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