Microsoft selects Ubuntu for first Linux-based Azure offering

Microsoft today announced a new cloud-based service for running queries on big data stored in Microsoft’s growing public cloud, named Azure Data Lake.

Canonical and Microsoft confirmed in a joint announcement that the Hadoop-based big data service offering HDInsight will run on Ubuntu and Hortonworks.

The expanded data lake includes a store which will make it easy for users to capture data of any size, type or speed, without forcing change to the application as the data scales.

According to a blog post published September 28, the Azure Data Lake Store supports development of big data solutions through a variety of languages and frameworks. “U-SQL’s scalable distributed query capability enables you to efficiently analyze data in the store and across SQL Servers in Azure, Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Data Warehouse”.

The firm billed Azure Data Lake Store as HDRS for the cloud, capable of chomping petabyte files and that would be “enterprise ready”.

This move from Microsoft will surely help its Azure service to be distinguishable in the ever-increasing crowd of public cloud providers with data services out there.

Zannos added, “Over the past year Microsoft has been an active proponent of open-source software technologies, and we at Canonical are delighted to be Microsoft’s Linux of choice in Azure and now HDInsight”. For those who favor using Azure as a base for big data and are comfortable with Hadoop, but aren’t as enthusiastic about managing Hadoop, Azure Data Lake also includes Microsoft’s managed Hadoop distribution, HDInsight.

“With the processing and storage of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data in Azure HDInsight repositories, it is critical that all sensitive data be identified, protected and monitored to ensure adherence to compliance mandates”, said JT Sison, VP, Marketing for Dataguise.

With Azure Data Lake Store, Microsoft is deepening its presence in the data processing and analytics space. It’s also supported by Hadoop ISV applications spanning security, governance, data preparation, and analytics that can be deployed from the Azure Marketplace.

Microsoft’s Visual Studio Tools, meanwhile, have been updated to build, debug and tune for Hive queries and Storm topologies running in HDInsight. As of Monday, managed clusters on Linux are generally available with a service-level agreement (SLA) specifying 99.9 percent uptime.