Azure HDInsight Release: Big Data, Big Performance, Big Bet on Hadoop

Posted by Openness Team

Yesterday at the Hadoop Summit, Microsoft announced Azure HDInsight’s support for Hadoop 2.4. This is the next release of our 100 percent Apache Hadoop-based distribution for Microsoft Azure and it provides order magnitude (up to 100x) performance improvements to query response times and continues to leverage the benefits of YARN.

Hadoop is a cornerstone of Microsoft’s commitment to making data work for everyone. As part of this bet we have fully embraced the Hadoop ecosystem and have prioritized contributing back to the community and Apache Hadoop-related projects, including Tez, Stinger and Hive. All told, we’ve contributed 30,000 lines of code and put in 10,000+ engineering hours to support these projects, including the porting of Hadoop to Windows.

We’ve done this in partnership with Hortonworks, a relationship that ensures our Hadoop solutions are based on compatible implementations of Hadoop. In additional to Azure HDInsight, this partnership has delivered the Hortonworks Data Platform for Windows.

For the complete scoop on this release, including HDInsight customer stories like City of Barcelona and Virginia Polytechnic Institute, please visit the Microsoft Azure and SQL Server blogs.