Open Source is Now a Big Data Service

Open source technologies continue to make headway across a range of industries undergoing digital conversions. The big data sector has of course led the way with a growing list of Apache Foundation projects ranging from Hadoop to Spark that have made their way into data-centric enterprises coping with huge data volumes. Among the vendors seeking to make access to open source technologies a single-click service is the Silicon Valley startup Instaclustr, which touts its “Open Source-as-a-Service” platform as a way of hosting and managing big data technologies in their “100 percent open source form.” Instaclustr, Palo Alto, Calif., this week announced a $15 million investment by New York-based Level Equity. The startup said it would use the funds to expand its big data platform for managing “core” open source technologies like Apache Cassandra, Apache Kafka and Apache Spark. The company’s platform is used to automate and manage access to analytics, database, messaging and search services. It expects to expand those services to include other open source platforms, including Apache Flink, Apache Ignite and the Elasticsearch analytics engine. It also plans to add other big data technologies that lend themselves to integration, scaling and performance as customers roll out next-generation data applications.