Founded in 2012, Pepperdata Inc. is a big data infrastructure management company that has grown by moving its cost-savings solutions from on-premises to the cloud.

In doing so, Pepperdata has formed a partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc., which leveraged the startup’s technology so that customers can realize savings while using its vast array of cloud services.

“They are taking us into customers where the customers have a cost problem,” said Ash Munshi (pictured), chief executive officer of Pepperdata. “It’s unusual for a company to basically say, ‘Hey, guess what? I’m going to take you into a customer to help them save money on my platform.’ Our core strength is basically being able to reduce cost by being able to utilize resources much better.”

Munshi spoke with Lisa Martin, industry analyst for theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, in advance of the “Analytics and Cost Optimization” AWS Startup Showcase on June 8. They discussed Pepperdata’s evolution as a key resource for cost savings in the cloud. (* Disclosure below.)

Evolution of Hadoop

Over 10 years ago, Pepperdata built its platform to support Hadoop, a framework for the efficient storage and processing of large datasets. While Hadoop has largely faded into the background, it still plays a key role in big data, according to Munshi.

“People think that Hadoop has disappeared; well, not really,” Munshi said. “Hadoop has been replaced by Spark … the computational engine that a lot of people use for big data. It turns out that Spark can be used for doing machine learning as well, so as machine learning started taking off, guess what happened? Big data became broader. It wasn’t just analytics anymore.”

Broader use of big data has translated into more tools offered by major cloud providers. Amazon’s EMR cloud big data platform can install and configure applications in Hadoop and, as Munshi noted, his company has evolved because Hadoop has evolved.

“Hadoop has gone from on-premises with large clusters that people were doing to hosted on AWS,” Munshi said. “We have EMR, which is the modern version of Hadoop. That’s in the cloud, which is growing very nicely as a business for Amazon.”

In addition to Pepperdata’s cost-savings work surrounding EMR, the company has also been providing support for clients in the managed Kubernetes space. This includes Amazon’s use of Elastic Kubernetes Service.

“We’re unique in being able to deliver a total solution for EKS and provide the same kind of savings across the entire gamut,” Munshi said. “Kubernetes is a place where you can unify both big data as well as microservices. Well, it turns out that microservices are also wasteful. We have a unified platform that allows us to have savings in microservices, as well as on the batch or the big data side.”

Pepperdata’s focus on big data processing cost is designed to help customers sort through the array of options when savings are needed. This often involves a process to analyze usage, identify cost and then manually trim to meet budget.

“These are dynamic things, and when dynamic things happen, and when they scale up and down, what you want to make sure of is they don’t scale too fast or they don’t scale too slowly,” Munshi said. “That’s where you can eat up a lot of cost as well. We monitor that on a continuous basis, and then we make sure that you use only the resources that are required to do the computation you need.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s upcoming “Analytics and Cost Optimization” AWS Startup Showcase on June 8:

(* Disclosure: Pepperdata Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Pepperdata nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE