Todd Mostak is CEO and co-founder of MapD Technologies.
Over at the MapD blog, Todd Mostak writes the company has justed launched the MapD Cloud, a major milestone GPU-accelerated analytics.
With MapD Cloud, anyone can spin up a 2-week trial of our platform in less than 60 seconds, and then continue as a customer with a mix of self-service individual and enterprise plans. The launch of MapD cloud is the next major step toward our larger vision of giving everyone access to GPU-accelerated analytics, following our decision to open source the core of the platform nearly a year ago.
Users can kick the tires by running on a 14-day, free trial of MapD Cloud. MapD Cloud is available via self-service Individual plans, as well as an Enterprise option for teams that require greater scale, High Availability, and direct access to their instance. Individual plans start at $150 per month, with a data allowance of 10 million rows, and range up to a 100 million row allowance.
Today’s announcement has been long in the making. While we have envisioned such a service since the early days of the company, the actual implementation was difficult, at scale, without widespread availability of GPUs in the public cloud. Back in 2016, when we made MapD generally available, it was far more difficult for a customer to set up a cluster of GPUs to run our software. Only a few hardware manufacturers carried GPU server SKUs, and they were scarce in the public clouds. Customers with pressing demand tended to find a way, but it was harder for mainstream adopters to justify procurement of seemingly exotic hardware to run software on the hunch that it might be game changing.
But over the last 2 years we’ve seen a dramatic rise of GPU computing adoption. Businesses and governments have purchased large quantities of GPU hardware to support burgeoning deep learning and machine learning initiatives. All of the major cloud platforms, including Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM, have added first-class support for GPU infrastructure.
At MapD we have taken advantage of both trends, partnering with hardware vendors to standardize on-premises deployments, and also launching on the AWS marketplace. As the leading innovator in GPU-accelerated analytics, we are not stopping with what we’ve launched today. In the future, we will roll out more SaaS options and work to continuously increase adoption and to improve the user experience.
