Appendix A. Hadoop for Microsoft Windows

Traditionally, Hadoop has been supported on Unix-based operating systems. Installation on Microsoft Windows was tedious and not consistent. It involved installing Unix-based emulators such as Cygwin and carrying out installation steps similar to Hadoop installations on Unix systems. Other alternatives were to run a Linux virtual machine on Windows hosts and install Hadoop on them. But Hadoop was still not natively available on the Microsoft Windows operating system until Hadoop 2.0 arrived.

With all major players moving into the cloud, the Hadoop as a Service (HaaS) offering is becoming popular. It offers an easy and cost-efficient way of analyzing big data on the cloud. Microsoft also joined the cloud bandwagon with the Azure suite of services on the cloud. The Microsoft Azure cloud not only supports Linux Virtual Machines, but also provides Hadoop as a service. Players such as Hortonworks collaborated with Microsoft to bring Hadoop to...