Right now, Amazon EMR, Cloudera Director, and Microsoft Azure HDInsight Service are some of the major vendors offering matured Hadoop and Hive services in the cloud. Using the cloud version of Hive is very convenient. It almost requests no installation and setup.

Amazon EMR (http://aws.amazon.com/elasticmapreduce/) is the earliest Hadoop service in the cloud. However, it is not a pure open sourced version of Hadoop, but is customized to run only on AWS cloud. Cloudera is one of the first few players that offered open source Hadoop solutions to the enterprise. Since the middle of October 2014, Cloudera has delivered Cloudera Director (http://www.cloudera.com/content/cloudera/en/products-and-services/director.html), which opens up Hadoop deployments in the cloud through a simple, self-service interface, and is fully supported on Amazon Web Services. Windows Azure HDInsight Service (http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/services/hdinsight/) is a service that...