Windows Azure HDInsight Released for GA
Today, Microsoft announced the general availability of Windows Azure HDInsight, its cloud-based distribution of Hadoop. Further expanding on Microsoft’s big data strategy, Microsoft CVP Quentin Clark will deliver a keynote at O’Reilly Strata + Hadoop World tomorrow, where he will discuss Microsoft’s vision to democratize big data by providing easy to use tools and a unified data platform. Clark further detailed this approach in a post on the Official Microsoft Blog.
News Highlights from Strata + Hadoop World Conference
- Windows Azure HDInsight, available today, is an open and flexible platform that provides 100% Apache Hadoop as a service in the cloud. HDInsight builds on top of the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) to ensure full compatibility with Apache Hadoop. HDInsight offers customers:
- Insights with familiar tools: Through integration with Microsoft’s business intelligence tools, HDInsight enables customers to easily analyze data in Excel.
- Deployment Agility: With HDInsight customers can deploy and provision a Hadoop cluster, no matter the size, in minutes instead of hours or days, without losing any data.
- Enterprise-ready Hadoop: HDInsight offers enterprise-class security and manageability with a secure node in every cluster and extensive support for PowerShell scripting.
- Rich developer experience: Developers have a choice of languages including .NET, Java and others. .NET developers can exploit the full power of language-integrated query with LINQ to Hive, and database developers can use existing skills to query and transform data through Hive.
- Customers such as Christian Hansen, City of Barcelona, and Virginia Tech are using HDInsight to give their data the power of Hadoop and the scalability of Windows Azure.
- Interested customers can begin using Windows Azure HDInsight now.
For more information on today’s news, check out Clark’s post on the Official Microsoft Blog. To follow the news from O’Reilly Strata + Hadoop World, follow the conversation on Twitter at @SQLServer and #strataconf.
