Log management software startup Sumo Logic went out of stealth just a few months ago, and it has been keeping very busy ever since. The company dove right into a freemium model this week with the debut of Sumo Logic Free, a new edition of its analytical solution that is deployed on Amazon Web Services.

The free version offers full functionality, which is something we don’t see very often. It covers LogReduce, a real-time analytics technology developed by the company to spot patterns more effectively, as well as Elastic Log Processing. The latter is another pending patent that allows Sumo Logic to ingest petabytes of data at a time, making it much more viable in big data environments where such volumes are being processed.

The catch is that Sumo Logic Free can only hold 3.5GB of log data at a time. That’s not enough for any serious application but is more than sufficient to let a potential future client test the waters before they commit to a deal.

“The real-time indexing engine behind Sumo Logic Free is a game changer,” said Sylvain Niles, Head of Operations at Outright. “Despite the large quantities of data that we manage on a daily basis, Sumo Logic’s service has freed Outright to reduce the time spent managing logs to almost zero, increasing the amount of time available for application development. With Sumo Logic, Outright was quickly able to exceed the efficiency of any on-premise solution we could have built, for a more streamlined view of our log data.”

Cloud analytics is one sub-trend that’s not slowing down. Just a week ago MapR said it’s making its Hadoop distribution available on AWS for an hourly fee.