Microsoft has expanded the reach of its Azure HDInsight onto Ubuntu Linux for the first time. The cloud-based big data analytics service has been available to Windows customers for some time and after it was unveiled as a public preview in February it is now fully available to Linux users.
By choosing to bring Azure HDInsight to Ubuntu Linux it is further enhancing its own cross-platform aspirations. At the same time as delivering the Hortonworks Hadoop service to Linux, Azure HDInsight also comes with a service level agreement that has the added caveat of 99.9% uptime and full technical support for the whole stack.
Both sides are hoping that by opening Azure HDInsight up to Linux customers it will accelerate a move towards hybrid cloud computing that allows enterprises to choose from on-premise and on-cloud computing. It will also help to enable large-scale deployments that span across both private and public infrastructures.
Microsoft has decided to make the offering available publicly following a wildly successful period of customer and partner adoption since its launch as a public preview at Strata + Hadoop World back in February.
Making things easier
Customers have so far favoured the technology as it makes it a lot easier to move their on-premises Hadoop deployments to the cloud and brings those running Hortonworks Data Platform on premise in their own data centres on board.
Microsoft's trust in the open source community has been building for some time following a number of years when it was far from cooperative. The strides it has made in the open source department are perhaps best illustrated by the reports that emerged of it open sourcing the Windows 10 source code at some point in the future.
