The on-demand model of the cloud is spreading to the farthest corners of the industry with increasing demand from organizations for greater flexibility in how they consume technology. The trend passed another milestone in its expansion last week as one of the top hosting providers in the Hadoop ecosystem revealed a pay-as-you-go implementation of Spark.

The data crunching framework can process certain workloads up to 100 times faster than its predecessor and natively supports complicated operations such as machine learning that required manual configuration in the past. Qubole Inc. now offers customers the ability to run the engine in its cloud-based Hadoop environment with a fraction of the complexity involved in setting up a deployment from scratch.

Besides making the startup’s service considerably more competitive in terms of performance, the addition also serves to extend the reach of the cloud to yet another part of the open-source ecosystem. SUSE Linux Gmbh marked a similar achievement in a different corner of the community on Tuesday when it introduced a homegrown version of Ceph that promises to bring the management flexibility of infrastructure-as-a-service platforms behind the firewall.

The launch comes as a response to arch-rival Red Hat Inc., which acquired the top distributor of the open-source storage platform last year and has offered its own flavor for nearly as long. SUSE Storage continues the broader industry effort toward making it possible for administrators to manage capacity separately from the underlying infrastructure, a push that extends far beyond the confines of the open-source community.

Nutanix Inc. is working toward the same goal with its Virtual Computing Platform, which aggregates direct-attached storage drives hooked up to servers into a shared pool that can be scaled and provision more easily than its individual pieceparts. The converged appliance maker last week revealed plans for a standalone implementation that will have the ability to run on hardware other than its converged data center modules.

The upcoming release is aimed at allowing organizations to try out the capabilities of the platform without having to buy an expensive system, which should significantly lower the entry barrier and increase the reach of Nutanix’s value proposition proportionally. It could also have the effect of pulling the company’s rivals into the software-defined mix, which would provide a massive boost for cloud storage in the enterprise.