Big-data-as-a-service provider BlueData Software Inc. has ported its EPIC Big Data-as-a-Service software to the Amazon Web Services Inc. infrastructure.

The company said on Wednesday that it’s the first Big Data-as-a-Service platform to support both on-premises and cloud environments using Docker containers for portability between the two. Support for Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and other public cloud services is planned.

BlueData said EPIC enables data scientists, developers and analysts to work with their data frameworks and tools of choice. Those include Apache Spark; Hadoop distributions from Cloudera Inc., Hortonworks Inc. and MapR Technologies Inc.; Apache Kafka; Apache Cassandra; Jupyter and Apache Zeppelin notebooks; and Python and R libraries.

The service abstracts the AWS-specific infrastructure to enable rapid on-boarding of teams and workloads without the need for DevOps expertise. Self-service clusters are preconfigured on Amazon EC2 for Spark, Hadoop, Kafka, Cassandra and other big data applications.

Click and go

“You click on a link and it enables the right EC2 instances, injects a Docker container and the same image works on premises and in the cloud,” said Anant Chintamaneni, vice president of products. “You can build an image once and run it wherever you want.”

Users can hold down AWS costs through the use of fine-grained resource quotas, start/stop controls and cost reporting in a multi-tenant environment. Clusters are pre-built for Amazon S3 and on-premise storage. Security controls include integration with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Microsoft Active Directory and Kerberos. AWS customers can spin up their own big data environments in minutes without needing DevOps or AWS-specific skills, the company said.

Organizations are trying to consolidate big data instances because they see silos and sprawl creeping in, Chintamaneni said. “They’re consolidating on larger servers, running more instances on more nodes,” he said. “We’re basically the infrastructure software that gets them multi-tenancy, elasticity and dataset isolation.”

The BlueData EPIC software platform is licensed for AWS based on the number of Amazon EC2 instances. Prices start at $499 per month for 15 managed instances. On-premise licensing is based on the number of physical cores, beginning at $500 per physical core per year, with volume discounts.

The company has raised $39 million since its founding in 2012. Investors include Amplify Partners, Atlantic Bridge Capital, Ignition Partners and Intel Capital Corp.