With cloud computing becoming a focus for its elasticity and cost-effectiveness, Microsoft has moved into the arena to compete with existing players. To maintain parity with competition, Microsoft Azure not only offers Linux-based Virtual Machines, but has also embraced open source big data systems such as Hadoop. HDInsight offers HaaS on Microsoft Azure.
The key takeaways from this chapter are as follows:
Hadoop is now natively available on Windows. Installing Unix emulators or Linux VMs on Windows OS is no longer necessary.
Hadoop support on Windows natively has two missing features: Security features and short-circuit HDFS reads are not yet integrated with this system.
Hadoop on Windows requires building the Hadoop distribution from scratch. Direct download of Hadoop binaries for Windows is not yet available.
HDInsight, Hadoop as a service offering on Microsoft Azure, provides seamless Excel integration and integration with platforms such as the Hortonworks Data Platform.