Remember Hadoop? You know the big data architecture. Redmond outlined its plans to support the ability to deploy, manage and run Hadoop clusters on its cloud platform a while back, and now the company is launching this anticipated feature.
The company’s implementation of Hadoop goes by the name of Windows Azure HDInsight.
Microsoft first announced support for Hadoop on Windows Azure earlier this year, some seven months back to be exact. It has been in test as a public preview since March.
And now the technology titan has announced that it is ready for general availability.
Quentin Clark, the company’s Corporate Vice President of the Data Platform Group stated that Windows Azure HDInsight now offers the open source benefits that Hadoop provides and merges them with the security and management features that Microsoft prides itself on:
“We have built it to integrate with Excel and Power BI – our business intelligence offering that is part of Office 365 – allowing people to easily connect to data through HDInsight, then refine and do business analytics in a turnkey fashion. For the developer, HDInsight also supports choice of languages: .NET, Java and more.”
The senior executive also shared details that a number of customers are already using Windows Azure HDInsight, and these include a team of Virginia Tech computer scientists.
And regarding future plans, the company confirmed that it has been working with Hortonworks on this project, and is gearing up to release HDP (Hortonworks Data Platform) 2.0 for Windows Server sometime this November.
HDInsight will also get support for Hadoop v2 in a future version.
