After years of collaboration with Hortonworks, Microsoft recently revealed news of its Hadoop as a service offering via its Windows Azure cloud platform. The offering, based on the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), is called Windows Azure HDInsight and boasts compatibility with Excel, SQL Server and PowerBI. According to a Microsoft blog post by Quentin Clark, Corporate Vice President of the Data Platform Group at Microsoft, “Windows Azure HDInsight combines the best of Hadoop open source technology with the security, elasticity and manageability that enterprises require.” HDInsight supports .NET and Java for developers and represents part of Microsoft’s larger strategic goal of bringing big data to a billion people. Microsoft elaborated on its Hortonworks-based Hadoop as a service offering just as Rackspace made a similar announcement in the context of its own public cloud and managed hosting platform.
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