other arguments aside .. Athena costs $5 per 1TB scanned and also supports predicates pushdown to S3 Select. I wouldn't call this expensive, at least in comparison to self hosted Presto.
At a certain scale it does become very expensive. It's easy math.
When your monthly Athena bill crosses whatever it would cost to have 5 or 10 EC2 machines it'll be cheaper to use Trino. At my previous workplace we moved from ~$40,000/month to ~$18,000/month by replacing Athena.
Athena is a very good tool to start with - unless you have super large scale you'll probably not outgrow it. But when you do there's Trino.
I do contribute to Trino - although I was merely a user when that cost reduction happened.
I'm not sure the math is so easy. Even knowing the direct cost savings in hindsight, engineers' time is expensive, and it's not obvious that the ongoing engineering cost of maintaining Trino on an EC2 cluster would be that far below $22k/month. Even if you get a net cost savings on an ongoing basis (which, granted, you probably do), you may have a long payback period for the initial engineering time spent evaluating solutions and getting the deployment spun up.
And that's all with the benefit of hindsight - it's hard to know a priori how much cheaper your own deployment will be compared to a managed service or how long it will take to implement. Of course, anecdotes like yours help with that, so thanks for sharing your experience!
Sure, I agree, above certain usage threshold hosted Trino becomes totally justified. But then, some engineering time to maintain the cluster has to be factored in as well.. for anything ad-hoc in nature, I would start with Athena by default.
hashhar|3 years ago
When your monthly Athena bill crosses whatever it would cost to have 5 or 10 EC2 machines it'll be cheaper to use Trino. At my previous workplace we moved from ~$40,000/month to ~$18,000/month by replacing Athena.
Athena is a very good tool to start with - unless you have super large scale you'll probably not outgrow it. But when you do there's Trino.
I do contribute to Trino - although I was merely a user when that cost reduction happened.
tfehring|3 years ago
And that's all with the benefit of hindsight - it's hard to know a priori how much cheaper your own deployment will be compared to a managed service or how long it will take to implement. Of course, anecdotes like yours help with that, so thanks for sharing your experience!
dmitrykoval|3 years ago