Microsoft Launches Azure HDInsight on Linux

Microsoft has released the first Microsoft Azure managed service, HDInsight, to be available on Linux. Azure HDInsight is Microsoft’s Hadoop-as-a-service offering built on top of the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) and architected for the Azure cloud. 

With this announcement, users will have a choice to select either Windows or Linux when deploying HDInsight from the Azure portal. Both options offering simple deployment, SLA, and technical support for the entire stack, ranging from Hadoop to the operating system.

Users with prior experience deploying Hadoop in Linux on-premise will be able to leverage their existing skillsets and tooling (documentation, samples, and templates) to work with HDInsight. Familiar tools like SSH and Ambari are now available to use.

SSH connectivity to HDInsight clusters is enabled by default for all HDInsight on Linux clusters. Use an SSH client of choice to connect to the cluster. Additionally, SSH tunneling can be leveraged for forwarding traffic from your browser to all of the Hadoop web applications.

Ambari is a project for the management and monitoring of Big Data clusters. You’ll find it deployed to the cluster when you browse to it from the Azure portal.  Ambari provides a single view of the performance and state of your Hadoop cluster, as well as providing the ability to customize configuration setting, and deploy additional Hadoop apps onto the cluster. Ambari provides monitoring and alerting within the HDInsight cluster, configurable from a web app hosted on the cluster.

- Crunch large non-relational datasets that come in real-time: A core value for Hadoop is the ability to process large volumes of data whether it be relational or non-relational in near real-time.

- Fast Time To Value: As a Hadoop-as-a-service, anyone can spin up Hadoop on any number of nodes with just a few clicks and within minutes.

- Minimal deployment expertise with no hardware planning or maintenance required: Because you can spin up clusters on-demand, you will not have to do hardware maintenance, tuning, patching, upgrades and capacity planning.

- Backed by Microsoft’s reliability SLA: Backed by Azure’s 99.9% reliability guarantee, Microsoft will be monitoring clusters 24×7.

More information is available on the Azure website.