Consumers expect instant gratification from software applications nowadays. Such demands call for apps that talk back in natural language and resolve queries in real time. The infrastructure required for such an easy end-user experience is anything but easy to operate. That’s why some companies opt to outsource the necessary operations to specialist service vendors.

In recent years, real time data processing initiatives have gone mainstream in enterprise computing. More and more enterprises realize old-school, batch-style apps won’t satisfy customers, according to Todd Greene (pictured, left), chief executive officer of PubNub Inc., which helps organizations with real-time deployments.

“If they release any kind of application — whether it’s a business application or a consumer app — if it doesn’t have that same real-time experience, like an Uber or like a Snapchat, people kind of look at it and say, ‘This feels like it was built 20 years ago,” he said.

Several years ago, many companies delivering real-time apps had to build custom infrastructure for the purpose. This gave PubNub the idea for its data-stream network to provide an always-on connection over the internet to deliver data bidirectionally to devices.

“Customers pay us not for our technology, but for our ability to operate our technology at massive scale,” Greene said.

PubNub in turn relies on Instaclustr Pty. Ltd. to operate mass-scale open-source technologies — like the Apache Cassandra database — on its behalf.

Greene and Peter Nichol (pictured, right) chief executive officer of Instaclustr, spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd, during AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. They discussed the infrastructure legwork that goes into real-time and why companies should outsource it. (* Disclosure below.)

Users pick ground, Intstaclustr does the digging

Itstaclustr does not develop any proprietary products. It focuses 100 percent on managing open-source software (specifically at the data layer) for customers.

“If they want to use Cassandra, they go to our website, they go to the customer portal, they choose the cloud provider they want to use, they choose the technology they want to use, what region do they want to run in, what size is their cluster, they press a button, and everything else is done behind the scenes by us,” Nichol said.

Instead of assembling teams for each individual software, customers like PubNub can have Instaclustr operate and manage them 24/7. Outsourcing is cheaper and shortens go-to-marker time cycles, he added.

The company also integrates technologies for customers. “Rather than having five different vendors to manage five different technologies, we provide the complete platform,” Nichol 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: Instaclustr Pty. Ltd. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Instaclustr nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE