MapR-based Hadoop Clusters Coming to the Azure Marketplace

Microsoft is committed to continuous innovation to make Azure the best cloud platform for running hyper-scale big data projects. This includes an existing Hadoop-as-a-service solution, Azure HDInsight, a hyper-scale repository for big data, Azure Data Lake, and Hadoop infrastructure-as-a-service offerings from Hortonworks and Cloudera. This week, Hortonworks also announced their most recent milestone with Hortonworks Data Platform 2.3 which will be available on Azure this summer.

Today, we are excited to announce that MapR will also be available in the summer as an option for customers to deploy Hadoop from the Azure Marketplace. MapR is a leader in the Hadoop community that offers the MapR Distribution including Hadoop which includes MapR-FS, an HDFS and POSIX compliant file store, and MapR-DB, a NoSQL key value store. The Distribution also includes core Hadoop projects such as Hive, Impala, SparkSQL, and Drill, and MapR Control System, a comprehensive management system. When MapR is available in the Azure Marketplace, customers will be able to launch a full Hadoop cluster based on MapR as an Azure Virtual Machine with a few clicks. Together with Azure Data Lake, SQL Server, and Power BI, this will allow organizations to build big data solutions quickly and easily by using the best of Microsoft and MapR.

Our partnership with MapR allows customers to use the Hadoop distribution of their choice while getting the cloud benefits of Azure. It is also a sign of our continued commitment to make Hadoop more accessible to customers by supporting the ability to run big data workloads anywhere – on hosted VM’s and managed services in the public cloud, on-premises or in hybrid scenarios.

We are very excited be on this journey of making big data more readily accessible to accelerate ubiquitous adoption.  We hope you join us for this ride!

T.K. “Ranga” Rengarajan

Corporate Vice President, Data Platform at Microsoft