Microsoft has released its Azure hosted service so that it can run Linux.
Microsoft showed off a preview of Azure HDInsight running on Ubuntu and the makers of the open saucy gear Canonical claims that it is a recognition that Ubuntu is great for running Big Data solutions.
For those who came in late, Azure HDInsight, is Microsoft’s Apache Hadoop-based service in the Azure cloud. It is designed to make it easy for customers to evaluate petabytes of all types of data with fast, cost-effective scale on demand, as well as programming extensions so developers can use their favourite languages.
The big idea is that people that already use Hadoop on Linux on-premises like on Hortonworks Data Platform, because they can use common Linux tools, documentation, and templates and and now they can extend their deployment to Azure with hybrid cloud connections.
It is not all one way traffic. Canonical has Juju which is a Cloud Orchestration tool. This is the result of years of effort to optimize Big Data workloads on Ubuntu. This will mean that Azure will effectively gain access to this.
