MapR Technologies Inc. Thursday touted new Big Data streaming capabilities in its latest Ecosystem Pack, which is designed to keep developers up to date with the components of its Converged Data Platform.

MapR’s Ecosystem Pack 2.0 is a solution for developers who want to upgrade various components in the company’s open-source ecosystem stack. Updated quarterly, it lets developers stay ahead of the wave with popular open-source tools like Apache Spark and Apache Kafka, which are updated faster than MapR can roll out new versions of its flagship platform.

With MEP 2.0, developers gain access to new capabilities for streaming applications via support for Apache Kafka’s REST API and Kafka Connect. Apache Kafka is a distributed streaming platform that underpins MapR’s Streams technology, which is a publish-subscribe event streaming system used for Big Data analytics.

The company said the Kafka REST Proxy for MapR Streams lets customers use any development language in any environment that supports HTTP to work with streaming data. Also, the company said, the Kafka Connect for MapR Streams delivers a framework for standardized access between MapR Streams and the most popular data sources and targets.

“These capabilities further enable customers to build IoT-scale, global systems of record with MapR Streams by allowing embedded devices like microcontrollers to produce and consume data in real time using REST, while integrating data with other systems like RDBMSs and search engines,” the company said.

MEP 2.0 also comes with support for Apache Spark 2.0.1, which hit general availability on Oct. 3. The latest version of Spark allows programs to run faster while providing analytics results more quickly, thanks to its new in-memory columnar functionality which stores optimized data in RAM for faster access.

Apache Drill, the schema-free SQL query engine for cloud storage, Hadoop and NoSWL, has also been updated in MEP 2.0. Lastly, MEP 2.0 includes a new feature called MapR Installer Stanzas, which enables the API-driven installation of MapR clusters on-premises or in the cloud. This feature is part of MapR’s Spyglass Initiative, and helps users to build Stanzas, which are configuration files that describe clusters and execute them programmatically to automate new deployments. According to MapR, the new functionality is “especially useful” for developers who need to deploy elastic clusters in the cloud.

MapR said MEP 2.0 will be released later this month.