Back

 Industry News Details

 
Splicing a Pause Button into Cloud Machines Posted on : Aug 10 - 2020

Splice Machine develops a machine learning-enabled SQL database that is based on a closely engineered collection of distributed components, including HBase, Spark, and Zookeeper, not to mention H2O, TensorFlow, and Jupyter. Customers use it to build complex AI apps that include transactional, analytical, and ML components. The company just announced a Kubernetes operator for customers running in private cloud environments. So what’s CEO Monte Zweben’s favorite new feature?

 “How about that pause button?” Zweben said during a demo of Splice Machine’s Kubernetes Ops Center. “When you pause on Splice Machine, it drains Kubernetes nodes and makes them available for other applications to use.”

Support for Kubernetes is not new at Splice Machine. The company relied on Mesos for some time before pivoting to Kubernetes a couple of years ago. Since then, the company has used K8S to manage customer environments as part of its software as a service (SaaS) offering). Now with Kubernetes Ops Center, which was unveiled last week, customers running the platform on their own gear in their own data center (or in a private cloud) can also leverage Kubernetes to maximize their compute resources.

The pause button is placed prominently at the top of the Kubernetes Ops Center screen. When pressed, it instructs the Kubernetes distribution (Rancher and OpenShift are currently supported, with more on the way) to essentially put Splice on ice and prevent it from consuming any more resources.

This is a big deal considering the amount of resources that customers are wasting in the cloud. A report issued last week by Pepperdata, a provider of tuning solutions for big data applications, found that big companies were wasting millions of dollars, and that even smaller companies could save hundreds of thousands of dollars by tuning their applications (in particular, Apache Spark) to make better use of cloud resources. View More