This week, Microsoft announced three major updates to its Azure cloud computing service. First and most notably, its HD Insight big data service now includes Apache Storm for real-time streaming analysis. “If I want to see real-time analysis of what’s happening on my website instead of batch-process analysis of clickstreams using MapReduce, Storm is a good choice,” explained Microsoft’s Eron Kelly.
In addition, Microsoft is making available some free predictive applications for the Azure Machine Learning (ML) service. Finally, the Hortonworks Data Platform, which includes Hortonworks’ version of Hadoop, is now certified on Azure. Enterprises can easily deploy Hortonworks clusters using images from the Azure gallery.
