Apache Spark and Hadoop are widely regarded as the marquee tools in the box when it comes to crunching and consuming Big Data, but their complexity makes them extremely difficult for many organizations to deploy. Add to that their resource hungry nature, and the challenges for organizations can often be insurmountable.

Now though, Big Data-as-a-Service provider Altiscale Inc. has come up with a solution – it’s offering both Hadoop and Spark in the cloud, with elastic scalability and full operations support to liberate organizations from the hassle of running them on-premise.

Altiscale Data Cloud 4.0 comes with a number of major upgrades to core Hadoop components like HDFS and YARN, together with the introduction of Spark-as-a-Service with support for all major versions.

As shown in Databricks Inc’s newly published first annual Spark user survey, the platform is attracting a lot of attention from companies looking to leverage its ability to consume real-time data pipelines and streaming analytics. But getting started with Spark isn’t easy, which is why Altiscale has stepped in to simplify things.

Altiscale Data Cloud 4.0’s biggest advantage is it features expert advisory services to help customers establish analytical jobs. The company also offers full operational support to ensure that workloads complete successfully, and a high performance cloud infrastructure that has been specifically built and tuned for fast Big Data processing.

The platform also provides Hadoop YARN to take care of resource management tasks, along with a full set of data science tools to help companies dig into their data and obtain those invaluable business insights.

Altiscale claims that the new features afford customers increased performance, scalability and stability. Moreover, the platform meets new standards set by the somewhat controversial Open Data Platform (ODPi), which means that all software meeting the ODPi standards is certified to run on Altiscale Data Cloud 4.0.

“Altiscale is dedicated to providing its customers with a full breadth of production-ready big data analytical options. That’s why we’ve been active in the Spark community from the very beginning,” Raymie Stata, CEO and founder, Altiscale, said in prepared remarks.. “It’s also why Altiscale is ensuring that we support all major recent versions of Spark. Spark is evolving so rapidly that we want to ensure that anything that our customers rely on for Big Data analytics continues to be there for them.”

Altiscale is all set to show off its new platform at the Strata+Hadoop World conference taking place in New York City later this week. The company is offering attendees a demonstration of its platform, where it will show off the ability to run ODPi compliant applications.

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