Hadoop Summit: Azure HDInsight Now Supports Hadoop 2.4

The Hadoop Summit is in San Jose is in full swing, where T. K. Rengarajan, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of the Data Platform division delivered an insightful keynote that focused on Microsoft's strategy for big data, along with how the company is working to make Hadoop accessible in the cloud.

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Notably, Microsoft announced that Azure HDInsight now supports Hadoop 2.4. With this update, users can gain a 100x response time improvement thanks to the speed and scale of the cloud.

"The massive scale, power, elasticity and low cost of storage, makes the cloud the best place to deploy Hadoop. That's one of the reasons we have invested heavily in our cloud-based solution, Azure HDInsight, which combines the best of open source with the flexibility of cloud deployment," read a prepared statement on Microsoft's SQL Server blog.

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Microsoft explained that HDInsight is one piece of the company's comprehensive data platform, where it can be used to process data anywhere it lives. This includes tasks such as storing and retriving data from SQL Server or Azure SQL Database, using Azure HDInsight to deploy and provision Hadoop clusters in the cloud, or leveraging Excel and Power BI for Office 365 to analyze data.

You can download a free trial from Microsoft to start using Azure HDInsight to get your Hadoop clusters up and running in the cloud.