At the AWS re:Invent 2016 conference today, Splunk extended its alliance with Amazon Web Services (AWS) by delivering an update to the Splunk App for AWS in addition to making that free tool available for the first time on a Splunk Light instance that is specifically designed to meet the needs of small IT teams and individual developers.
Praveen Rangnath, senior director of marketing for cloud solutions at Splunk, says that as more application workloads migrate to AWS, the need for visibility into the most widely used public cloud computing environment continues to escalate.
“We’re now seeing entire data centers being forklifted into AWS,” says Rangnath.
The latest version of Splunk App for AWS provides access to enhanced dashboards, billing insights into multiple types of AWS instances, and integrated machine learning algorithms that identify cost optimization opportunities as well as potential security issues.
Meanwhile, support for Splunk Light makes that application available to smaller organizations at a price point starting at $3.00 a day. Rangnath notes that large swaths of the AWS public cloud are made up of small companies that need a simple mechanism to help them optimize their AWS environment and control costs.
For all the hype surrounding Big Data and Hadoop, it turns out that the most commonly deployed use case for Big Data in a production environment is often Splunk. By employing Splunk to analyze massive amounts of machine data, an IT organization can more easily exercise control over IT operations both inside its own data center as well as on public clouds such as AWS. Now that those public clouds are becoming a more standard element of the enterprise, it’s also clear that IT organizations are expected to be able to manage those external clouds just as easily as if they were their own local data center.