A startup called Chaos Sumo is touting a new data discovery, management and analytics service that sits on top of Amazon Web Services Inc.’s S3 storage to make data more easily discoverable.

The company said it has pioneered a concept called “smart object storage,” allowing data held inside S3 storage instances to be analyzed without the need to extract it first.

Chaos Sumo’s pitch is a straightforward one. The company said that despite S3’s huge popularity, it’s still essentially just a basic storage service. In order to perform analytics on data held within S3, customers first need to extract that data to other services via customized extract-transform-load code they must write themselves. Obviously, doing so is a big hassle, adding to the costs and complexity and generally requiring lots of skill.

That’s where Chaos Sumo’s new data discovery, management and analytics service is aimed. Specifically, what Chaos Sumo does is to bypass the ETL process by placing an abstraction layer and an application programming interface atop AWS S3 instances. The company’s “Data Edge” technology then organizes the data held within that instance, creating a universal file format that other services can easily tap into. That data can be published to a data warehouse such as Redshift or Snowflake, where it can be accessed by other services.

“All the new, powerful analytics tools on the market have one fatal flaw – they can’t do their own AWS S3 discovery without significant customization or specialists,” said Thomas Hazel, founder and chief technology officer at Chaos Sumo. “Our vision of Smart Object Storage is to inject analytics directly into the data store itself. The first step to that reality is the ability to know what you have and be able to organize it with a click of mouse, which is why we’ve released a free service for anyone to use.”

That free service is the Chaos Sumo Community Edition, which the company is making available in beta from today. It comes with some useful tools, including the ability to catalog object storage data according to file type, size, history and other metrics. The service also can identify duplicate data in order to help customers reduce the costs associated with S3 storage.

Eric Slack, a senior analyst at Evaluator Group, said those capabilities sound like they should be beneficial to companies who are finding that services like S3 are slowly becoming “data swamps” they cannot easily wade through.

“Integrating self-service data discovery and analytics into an S3 instance, through Smart Object Storage, will save big on time and resources,” Slack said. “It can also be the ‘secret weapon’ for many companies looking to harness data for competitive advantage.”

Adtech provider Nomad Technologies Inc. is already using the platform. The company said it has become so reliant on Chaos Sumo’s technology that it now refers to its as its “insights engine,” enabling it to get a full breakdown of its S3 data, including ad information, location, and images before before analyzing it. “What Chaos Sumo brings to the table is an easy, effective way to manage the madness without having to navigate a maze of complex technologies that really only get you part way to solving the issue,” said Nomad Chief Operating Officer David Greschler.

Chaos Sumo’s free community edition is available in beta now, with more information available here.

Image: Chaos Sumo