Splunk plunks seductive AaaS on Amazon cloud

Splunk has launched a free analytics-as-a-service product based on the Amazon Web Services cloud.

The company, whose name may or may not have been generated by a desperate Scrabble player, announced on Tuesday that its paid-for Splunk Enterprise product is now available as a service based on the AWS cloud.

Splunk's technology lets IT shops monitor and analyze machine data from sources as disparate as logs, performance metrics, sensors, events, and more.

It has features such as cluster management, access control, PDF delivery of reports, dashboards, pivot tables, searching, indexing, and alerting, among others.

Now, though, Splunk is chucking its on-premise software up into the Amazon cloud for analysis without the need for IT gear. The cloudy version of Splunk Enterprise can ingest and index data ranging from 50GB to 1TB per day.

It will be able to take in data from sources such as platform-as-a-service Heroku, Amazon instances themselves, and other machine data.

Given its location within Amazon's network and the major role the AWS cloud plays in cloud computing, we reckon this service will be most useful with people running a ton of AWS gear.

The company has also expanded the free tier of its data analysis and log management service Splunk Storm, to give developers access to 20GB of total storage per 30 days.

"We heard our customers loud and clear – they want Splunk Enterprise as a cloud service," Dejan Deklich, Splunk's veep of Cloud Engineering, enthused in a frothy press release announcing the service. ®