Everyone feels comfortable with what they know; whether it is choosing a place to eat or integrating cloud-based data management solutions. The recently announced enhanced partnership between Hortonworks Inc. and Google Cloud Platform is helping customers of both companies retain the security of a known environment when making the transition to the cloud.

“A lot of our customers have been telling us they like the familiar environment of Hortonworks distribution that they’ve been using on-premises, and as they look at moving to [Google] cloud … they want the similar, familiar environment,” said Sudhir Hasbe (pictured, right), director of product management at Google Cloud Platform.

Hasbe and Ram Venkatesh (pictured, left), vice president of engineering for Hortonworks, spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and James Kobielus (@jameskobielus), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the DataWorks Summit in San Jose, California. They discussed the evolution of big data analytics and the benefits of their partnership. (* Disclosure below.)

Cloud and hybrid flexibility, workload fluidity

“When [Hortonwork’s customers] move to the cloud, we want this experience to be seamless … we want all of their learning from a security and governance perspective to apply,” Venkatesh said. “[Hortonworks has] had this capability on Azure and on AWS, so with this partnership, we are announcing the same type of deep integration with GCP as well.”

The partnership creates support for the Hortonworks Data Platform and Hortonworks DataFlow to run on top of the Google Cloud Platform. “This includes deep integration with Google’s cloud storage connector layer, as well as a certified distribution of HDP to run on the Google Cloud Platform,” Venkatesh added.

One benefit for Hortonworks customers is the ability to not only store data in the Google Cloud, but execute ephemeral and analytic workloads and perform machine learning on the platform.

“What cloud allows you to do is scale the storage and compute independently, and so with storing data in Google Cloud Storage, you can scale that horizontally and then just leverage that as your storage layer,” Hasbe explained. “And the compute can independently scale by itself. … This is allowing customers of HDP and HDF to store the data on GCP, on the cloud storage, and then just use the scale, the compute side of it with HDP and HDF.”

The elastic compute resources of the cloud provide flexibility for workloads to “come and go” and gives more independence from the underlying cluster than an on-prem environment. “This is where the core business benefits around agility, speed of deployment, things like that come into play,” Venkatesh said.

Streaming analytics capabilities in-cloud are another benefit, giving customers the ability to build both hybrid and real-time streaming scenarios. “At Google [we] believe that the world will be more and more real-time. … We already are seeing a lot of these real-time scenarios with IoT events coming in and people making real-time decisions, and this is only going to grow,” Hasbe said.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE