Microsoft’s Azure Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service cloud computing tool today turned on support for Hadoop. Or, in Microsoft-speak, HDInsight is now a go, enabling “you to easily deploy and manage Hadoop Clusters.”
That warming sensation you are feeling is natural.
As ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley noted in a post on the matter, “Microsoft has made three private previews of the HDInsight Service on Azure available to select testers.” Today’s release is the very first publicly available Hadoop-On-Azure experience, however.
TNW has written about the coming inclusion of Hadoop on Azure, so anticipated has it been. Its boss, Satya Nadella, explained to TNW that while progress on Hadoop is perhaps nascent, it has promise:
Not all of Microsoft’s needed work on Azure is inside-facing, however, as its efforts on Hadoop have shown. “What I preach inside my team is, look, every billion dollar starts first with being a million dollars.”
Also out today from the Azure team is support for Windows Phone 7.5, mobile HTML5 clients, Mecurial, PhoneGap, and Dropbox integration. Dropbox, the massively popular file sharing service is a natural fit for Azure; it has your stuff, and Azure will calculate on it for you. For a technical dive on the new capabilities, head here.
While all the above features are now live, Microsoft notes that “some of the services are still in preview.”
Azure competes with Amazon’s AWS suite of service, and Rackspace’s cloud offerings as well. It’s a crowded, yet growing space. For more on Azure and how it fits into Microsoft’s ‘devices and service’ paradigm, head here.
Top Image Credit: Robert Scoble
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