What are entrepreneurs to do at a time when cloud technology is booming but many customers’ software applications are still glued on-premises hardware? Wrap a hardware appliance, software platform and select Amazon Web Services Inc. offerings in a single package like just-launched Zettabytes Inc.

“It’s a software platform, as well as an appliance,” said Rishi Yadav (pictured, right), co-founder and chief executive officer of Zettabytes.

Actually, it could be both or either; Zettabytes does sell a physical appliance geared for its software platform. However, the software platform can be purchased solo and run on a customers’s own choice of hardware.

“The beauty of an appliance is that everything is already optimized for you,” Yadav said.

Yadav joined Sudhir Jangir (pictured, left), co-founder and chief technology officer of Zettabytes, during an interview at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They spoke to John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd. (* Disclosure below.)

A measured dose of AWS for hybrid cloud

The information technology reality of most businesses lends itself to a hybridized solution, according to Yadav. There are a number of reasons why they cannot simply march all applications to AWS or another public cloud. Admittedly, AWS is brilliant for greenfield or cloud-native applications, he added. However, teaching an app born and bred on physical infrastructure to live in cloud can be like training an errant Chihuahua.

“When it comes to transforming the existing application, it becomes a big, big challenge,” Yadav said.

Applications that run in “internet of things” edge devices also present a quandary for those looking to go all in on AWS. “IoT workloads by definition cannot be on AWS,” Yadav said.

This is not to say that AWS isn’t where it’s at for some workloads — au contraire. Zettabytes has handpicked the AWS services best suited to a hybrid environment, including S3 scalable object storage, Lambda serverless compute platform and Kineses streaming data engine.

Zettabytes uses Kubernetes container orchestration management so customers can seamlessly deploy applications onto physical infrastructure or AWS. They can use the AWS application program interfaces and software development kit on-prem.

“Now, using Kubernetes, you decide where this workload will go,” Jangir concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Zettabytes Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Zettabytes nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE