Microsoft has already rolled out an Azure HD Insight version that runs on Linux (Ubuntu). It is cloud Hadoop distribution – that runs on Ubuntu. It was announced at Strata Conference. Though Linux instances were readily available on Azure Cloud - IAAS (Infrastructure as a Service), however this is the first time that Microsoft has managed to enable Azure to host a service that runs on Linux. It is Microsoft’s Apache Hadoop-based service in the Azure cloud. It looks like a great business opportunity for the software and mobile outsourcing firms across nations.
As we all know that most of the Hadoop’s deployment runs on Linux, and now with Microsoft efforts that has put HD Insight in a place where more and more developers will get attracted towards Hadoop experience. The firm has also put in efforts in making Hadoop a bit more Window friendly from what we had back in 2012, where Microsoft first proposed to improve Hadoop for Windows Server and Azure to Apache. Hence the announcement was perfectly aligned with their promise.
In accomplishing this Microsoft has also involved the effort of Hortonworks – a leading enterprise Hadoop distribution vendor. So it is a Big Data Hosted Solution presented by the collective efforts of Microsoft, Hortonworks and Ubuntu. HDInsight will now offer Hadoop on Azure, running on Ubuntu and supported by Canonical, running parallel with our other computer services.
Another possibly big new competency is ranging Linux-based Hadoop clusters sitting in consumer’s own data centers to Azure and using the same Linux tools, templates and documentation across both environments. The customers can now evaluate all types of data with fast and cost-effective scale on demand. The service supports and is scalable of an Azure hosted service, paired with the Linux ecosystem. Moreover it has programming extensions for the web and mobile developers so that they can use their favorite languages.
Why Ubuntu? Describing the reason, T.K. Rengarajan, corporate vice president of Data Platform at Microsoft wrote that due to the obvious popularity of the enterprise distribution of the Linux and on the top of that it is the leading scale-out Linux. Supporting the vice president’s statement, Corey Sanders- director of program management at Azure, said that the firm will also provide support for HDInsight on Azure.
Sanders also explained that the Customers can utilize the same skills and tools they use for their Linux Hadoop deployments on premises and migrate to Azure platform or even create hybrid deployments without bothering themselves about managing the infrastructure of the service.
He added that the Azure cloud VM service fully technically supports six Linux distributions. According to Sanders, one out of five customer VMs deployed on Azure run on Linux. The web and mobile developers have become very effective at building insurance so that each server under their watch would run in perfect accordance with their policies.
Microsoft has been gradually changing its old reputation of a stuffy software giant opposed to open source. The service is presently available in four Azure regions – two in U.S., one in Asia and one in Europe– however the software would be outsourced in all regions in coming several months including India as well.
