The challenges of processing real-time data on a large scale are compounded when the rate of input is dynamic. Not being able to provision enough capacity fast enough to meet a sudden traffic spike can bog the entire operation down, while failing to deallocate that capacity after it’s no longer with the same speed opens the door to massive cost overruns.

That’s the double bind Iron.io Inc. hopes to untangle for organizations with the help of the $8 million in funding it raised as part of a new investment round announced this morning aimed at accelerating the development of its data crunching software. The offering, which consists of two separate products, promises to take the hassle out of processing fast-moving information streams.

A customer first has to hook up the systems from which they wish to aggregate data to IronMQ, the data transfer component, which pipes metrics of interest into their backend deployment of the IronWorker execution framework. It’s a parallel processing engine that can take a piece of code such a filtering algorithm and automatically apply that function to all of the incoming information.

IronWorker provisions the underlying infrastructure resources all by itself and adjusts usage according to the input volume, which for some of the startup’s bigger customers measures in the billions of messages every day.  And after that data passes through its algorithms, the engine can push the results back out to the intended recipients via IronMQ.

The route that the information takes is highly customizable, with Iron.io providing a choice of over half a dozen languages in which developers can write their event processing functions and several scheduling options to accommodate specalized use cases. One example is delivering news alerts, which is what The Bleacher Report, one of the startup’s highest profile customers, is using the technology for.

The funding from the new round, which was led by Baseline Ventures and saw the participation of four other big-name investors including Bain Capital Ventures, will be used to help attract even more organizations to the platform. But the investment is intended as much to drive growth as it is to level the playing field against the competition.

Amazon Inc. added a managed alternative to the startup’s technology to its dominant public cloud last year and has been expanding the service ever since, which the new $8 million in capital will help Iron.io address more effectively. But seeing that Jeff Bezos’ form has continuously outpace multi-billion-dollar rivals such as Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. for the better part of the past decade, Iron.io still very much faces an uphill battle.

Photo via jingoba