This week at the DataWorks Summit, Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure HDInsight 3.6, backed by Microsoft’s enterprise-grade SLA. HDInsight 3.6 brings updates to various open source components in the Apache Hadoop and Spark ecosystem to the cloud, allowing customers to deploy them easily and run them reliably on an enterprise-grade platform.
“HDInsight 3.6 GA builds upon the public preview of 3.6, which included Apache Spark 2.1,” wrote Pranav Rastogi, Microsoft Program Manager. “We would like to thank you for trying the preview and providing us feedback, which has helped us improve the product.”
What’s new in Azure HDInsight 3.6:

  • HDInsight 3.6 has the latest Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) 2.6 platform, a collaborative effort between Microsoft and Hortonworks to bring HDP to market cloud-first. Read more about this effort here.
  • Apache Spark 2.1 is now generally available, backed by the existing SLA. Includes capabilities to support real-time streaming solutions with Spark integration to Azure Event Hubs and leverage the structured streaming connector in Kafka for HDInsight. Customers can now use Spark to analyze millions of real-time events ingested into these Azure services, thus enabling IoT and other real-time scenarios. Learn more on how to get started with Spark on HDInsight.
  • Apache Hive 2.1 enables approximately two-times faster ETL with robust SQL standard ACID merge support and many more improvements. This release includes an updated preview of Interactive Hive using LLAP (Long Lived and Process), which enables 25x faster queries. Learn more on how to get started with Interactive Hive on HDInsight.
  • New Hive views (Hive view 2.0), which provides an easy to use graphical user interface for developers to get started with Hadoop. Developers can use this to easily upload data to HDInsight, define tables, write queries and get insights from data faster using Hive views 2.0.

For more on what’s new in Azure HDInsight 3.6 and lots of resources to get started, check out the Azure blog.