Cloud Computing: Microsoft extends Azure Hadoop, mobile app development functionality

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Mikael Ricknäs.

Microsoft has released a number of enhancements to Windows Azure that will make it easier to deploy and manage Hadoop clusters and integrate more mobile apps with the cloud platform. To simplify the roll out of big data applications, Microsoft is offering a public preview of the new HDInsight service for Windows Azure, according to Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president in Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business. HDInsight lets users deploy, manage and use Hadoop clusters running on Windows Azure, he saidin a blog post.

Users with a Windows Azure account can request access to the preview and once that has been granted create a cluster from within the Windows Azure Management Portal. A storage account is also required and in the current version of the preview it must reside in the East U.S. region, according to Guthrie. A new installation will take a few minutes to create and as part of the process users need to configure the necessary virtual machines that will make up their Hadoop cluster, Guthrie said…

From the management console users can then click on "create job" to open a MapReduce job submission form. There is also an "interactive console" tile that lets users execute Javascript and Hive queries directly against their cluster. The latter provides a means of running a MapReduce job through a SQL-like scripting called HiveQL, which can be used to summarize, query and analyze large volumes of data…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/microsoft-extends-azure-hadoop-mobile-app-development-functionality-214788