R Server for HDInsight now generally available
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Today, we announced the general availability of R Server for Azure HDInsight. This gives Azure HDInsight the most comprehensive set of ML algorithms and statistical functions in the cloud that also leverages Hadoop and Spark.
What is R Server on HDInsight?
R is one of the most popular programming language that helps millions of data scientists solve their most challenging problems in fields ranging from computational biology to quantitative marketing. R Server for Azure HDInsight is a scale-out implementation of R integrated with Spark clusters created from HDInsight. This gives you the familiarity of the R language for machine learning while leveraging the scalability and reliability built into Spark. Multi-threaded math libraries and transparent parallelization in R Server handle up to 1000x more data and up to 50x faster speeds than open source R, helping you train more accurate models for better predictions than previously possible.
Work with the power and familiarity of R
A top choice among data scientists, the R programming language has a thriving global community of more than two million users worldwide, and the total number of open-source analytics packages is growing exponentially year over year. With R Server for HDInsight, you get full compatibility with the R language running at scale on Hadoop and Spark.
Terabyte-scale machine learning handles 1,000x more data
With transparent parallelization on top of Hadoop and Spark, R Server for HDInsight lets you handle terabytes of data—1,000x more than the open source R language alone. Train logistic regression models, trees, and ensembles on any amount of data. You’re only limited by the size of your Spark cluster.
Access Spark data sources through Spark SQL
New in GA, we include the ability to use Spark SQL as a data source for R Server. Load the results of a Spark SQL query against sources such as Apache Hive and Parquet to a Spark Data Frame, and analyze it directly using any R Server distributed computing algorithms.
Use the development tools of your choice
New in GA, we include R Studio Server Community Edition making it easy for data scientists to get started quickly. You can also download R Tools for Visual Studio free for a convenient local development environment.
How do I get started?
To get started, customers will need to have an Azure subscription or a free trial to Azure. With this in hand, you should be able to get a R Server cluster up and running in minutes by going through this getting started guide.
Also, head over to watch this Channel 9 video below.