December 12, 2011, 3:19 PM — Making good on an announcement made earlier this year, Microsoft has installed a version of Apache Hadoop on its Azure cloud service. The company now offers a limited preview version of the open-source data analysis platform, often used for big data-style analysis.
The availability is part of an Azure upgrade the company announced Monday.
The company has also installed onto Azure the Node.js JavaScript library, and has integrated its PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) offering with a number of other open-source applications. The Azure upgrade also includes adjusted Azure pricing, an increase in the amount of data that can be stored in SQL Azure, and adds real-time usage and billing information onto the management portal.
In October, Microsoft announced that it would offer Hadoop on Azure, with the help of Hortonworks, a Yahoo spinoff company that offers a Hadoop distribution.
Microsoft's Apache Hadoop Based Distribution for Windows Azure will feature a set of installers, a JavaScript library that will help developers build MapReduce jobs, as well as drivers for analyzing data in the Hadoop Hive database from Microsoft Excel and PowerPivot.
This update offers only a trial version of Hadoop, and Microsoft made no announcement of when it will be available as a full service. Those interested in running the preview version must submit a form. From the submissions, Microsoft will pick an unspecified number of users to test the platform, based on anticipated usage patterns.
In addition to Hadoop, Azure also now incorporates a number of other open-source technologies as well. With the Node.js library, developers can create Web applications that will run from an Azure version of Microsoft Server. Node.js is a collection of integrated JavaScript functions and a JavaScript runtime engine that can be used to build Web applications.
