The IT Melting Pot!

This is really cool!

Microsoft’s cloud-based distribution of Hadoop — which it has been developing for the past year-plus with Hortonworks — is generally available as of October 28.

Microsoft officials also are acknowledging publicly that Microsoft has dropped plans to deliver a Microsoft-Hortonworks developed implementation of Windows Server, which was known as HDInsight Server for Windows. Instead, Microsoft will be advising customers who want Hadoop on Windows Server to go with Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) for Windows.

Windows Azure HDInsight is “100 percent Apache Hadoop” and builds on top of HDP. HDInsight includes full compatibility with Apache Hadoop, as well as integration with Microsoft’s own business-intelligence tools, such as Excel, SQL Server and PowerBI.

“Our vision is how do we bring big data to a billion people,” said Eron Kelly, Microsoft’s SQL Server General Manager. “We want to make the data and insights accessible to everyone.” 

Making the Hadoop big-data framework available in the cloud, so that users can spin up and spin down Hadoop clusters when needed is one way Microsoft intends to meet this goal, Kelly said.

Microsoft and Hortonworks originally announced plans to bring the Hadoop big-data framework to Windows Server and Windows Azure in the fall of 2011. Microsoft made a first public preview of its Hadoop on Windows Server product (known officially as HDInsight Server for Windows) available in October 2012.

Microsoft made available its first public preview of its Hadoop on Windows Azure service, known as HDInsight Service, on March 18. Before that…

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//Richard