Microsoft Azure has started to support hadoop--Big Data cloud computing

Microsoft Azure has started to support Hadoop, which may be good news for companies that need elastic big data operations. It is reported that Microsoft has recently provided a preview version of the Azure HDInsight (Hadoop on Azure) service, running on the Linux operating system. The Azure HDInsight on Linux service is also built on Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), just like the corresponding Windows. Hdinsight is fully compatible with Apache Hadoop and integrates Microsoft's own business intelligence tools such as Excel, SQL Server, and Powerbi. As with the version of Windows, Microsoft plans to contribute back-end code developed for the Linux hdinsight version to the Apache community, as Microsoft says.

Microsoft provides Hadoop on Azure services to Linux users
The only Linux version currently supported by Hdinsight is Ubuntu (in virtual machines) and is supported by canonical. Microsoft has now started providing storm for Azure HDInsight. Storm is an open-source stream analytics platform that has been previewed for Azure Hdinsight since October 2014.
Microsoft's Azure Machine Learning Service is now fully available. Microsoft previewed Azure ML in June 2014, allowing developers and data scientists to build and deploy applications more quickly, and to access application programming interfaces and services such as recommendations, anomaly detection, and prediction via machine learning Marketplace.
Microsoft will use the Hadoop connector to integrate its NoSQL Azure services, Documentdb and Hdinsight. This makes documentdb either an input source for running Hadoop queries or where output hive, pig, and mapreduce work can be sent.
The data integration provider Informatica has supported the provision of its own Informatica Cloud agent technology in Linux and Windows Server virtual machines on Azure. Informatica provides cloud agents through azure marketplace, enabling the connectivity between Informatica technology and various azure data services.
The current Azure machine Learning preview pricing will take effect from March 31, 2015. Starting April 1, 2015, all new and existing Azure machine learning subscription users will be automatically converted to the standard version, billed accordingly, with no user intervention required. Existing users who do not want to migrate can start deleting their workspaces on April 1, 2015.
Microsoft says there is no change or charge for the free version of Auzre machine learning available from the Azure Web site.

Although Hadoop is already supported, there is a need for more caution in any commercial environment.

Microsoft Azure has started to support hadoop--Big Data cloud computing