Microsoft has announced some new capabilities for its Azure HDInsight big data cloud computing service. “With this new feature, you can now experiment and deploy Hadoop projects to Azure HDInsight that were not possible before,” blogged Microsoft’s Oliver Chiu. “This is enabled through the Script Action feature that can modify Hadoop clusters in arbitrary ways using custom scripts.”
In order to use these customization capabilities, administrators will need the latest version of Azure PowerShell. Microsoft’s website includes instructions for installing Spark and R using scripts.