Microsoft Brings Big Data to Windows Azure

by STB Blogger

Today, Microsoft announced that Windows Azure HDInsight Service – the company’s cloud-based distribution of Hadoop – is now available as a standard preview service through the Windows Azure Portal. Windows Azure HDInsight Service builds on top of the Hortonworks Data Platform to ensure full compatibility with Apache Hadoop while providing customers with the low cost and elasticity of cloud computing. During preview, the compute cost for HDInsight Service will be only 50% of the normal compute cost for Azure. Customers can get started here today.

Microsoft customers are already using HDInsight in production to find new insights on their big data.

  • 343 Industries, the Microsoft game studio that created Halo 4, is using HDInsight to gain valuable insight into player behavior and user preferences to continuously improve the gaming experience for customers.
  • Ascribe, a UK-based provider of business intelligence (BI), consultancy, and clinically-focused IT solutions and services for the healthcare industry, designed a hybrid-cloud solution based on Windows Azure HDInsight Service and with built-in BI tools that helps healthcare providers detect, predict, and respond more quickly to outbreaks of infectious disease and other health threats.

In addition, last week Hortonworks reported that the Hadoop community voted to move Hadoop on Windows to the main Apache Hadoop trunk. The engineering team at Microsoft and Hortonworks in collaboration with the Hadoop community made a number of enhancements to the Windows Server and Windows Azure Hadoop development and runtime environments which were merged into the Apache trunk. All of these enhancements are also incorporated into our Windows Azure HDInsight Service and HDInsight Server products and in Hortonworks’ HDP for Windows product.  

For more information on these updates, please read the Data Platform Insider blog post.