Cloud or on-prem? This big-data service now swings both ways

There are countless “as-a-service” offerings on the market today, and typically they live in the cloud. Back in 2014, startup BlueData blazed a different trail by launching its EPIC Enterprise big-data-as-a-service offering on-premises instead.

On Wednesday, BlueData announced that the software can now run on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other public clouds, making it the first BDaaS platform to work both ways, the company says.

“The future of big data analytics will be neither 100 percent on-premises nor 100 percent in the cloud,” said Kumar Sreekanti, CEO of BlueData. “We’re seeing more multicloud and hybrid deployments, with data both on-prem and in the cloud. BlueData provides the only solution that can meet the realities of these mixed environments in the enterprise.”

BlueData’s EPIC (short for “Elastic Private Instant Clusters”) platform taps embedded Docker container technology to let businesses spin up virtual Hadoop or Spark clusters within minutes on their existing infrastructure, the company says, giving data scientists on-demand access to the applications, data, and infrastructure.