Summary
With cloud computing becoming a focus for its elasticity and cost-effectiveness, Microsoft has moved into the arena to compete with existing players. To maintain parity with competition, Microsoft Azure not only offers Linux-based Virtual Machines, but has also embraced open source big data systems such as Hadoop. HDInsight offers HaaS on Microsoft Azure.
The key takeaways from this chapter are as follows:
- Hadoop is now natively available on Windows. Installing Unix emulators or Linux VMs on Windows OS is no longer necessary.
- Hadoop support on Windows natively has two missing features: Security features and short-circuit HDFS reads are not yet integrated with this system.
- Hadoop on Windows requires building the Hadoop distribution from scratch. Direct download of Hadoop binaries for Windows is not yet available.
- HDInsight, Hadoop as a service offering on Microsoft Azure, provides seamless Excel integration and integration with platforms such as the Hortonworks Data Platform.
