Today, at the Strata Conference we announced the preview of an Azure HDInsight version that runs on Linux.

Azure already supports six different distributions of Linux in our gallery and 1 out of 5 customer Virtual Machines deployed on Azure are running Linux. Now, with today’s announcement, we will be deploying, hosting, and managing an Azure-hosted service that runs on Ubuntu Linux Virtual Machines. HDInsight will now offer Hadoop on Azure, running on Ubuntu and supported by Canonical, running side-by-side with our other compute services (and yours).

John Zannos, vice president, Cloud Alliances at Canonical said, “With Azure HDInsight on Ubuntu, we are providing enterprises an easy means of turning their immense data streams into valuable and actionable intelligence. Microsoft’s leadership in public cloud enterprise solutions with Azure and Canonical’s leadership in big data, scale-out and cloud computing with Ubuntu form the basis of a robust, integrated cloud solution. This will enable enterprises to meet their big data challenges. DevOps already love Ubuntu for Hadoop, and we’re sure they’ll also love it on Azure.”

Since the onset of Azure, we have maintained a strong passion and a promise to our customers: Azure will deliver solutions, features, and products that meet your needs. This announcement is perfectly aligned with this promise. Customers are asking for the scale-out power of Azure and easy-to-use Azure services across many different development and management ecosystems. Hadoop on Ubuntu Linux offers the full power, support and scalability of an Azure hosted service, paired with the Linux ecosystem. Customers can leverage the same skills and tools they use for their Linux Hadoop deployments on-premises and migrate to Azure or create simple hybrid deployments without having to manage the infrastructure. Just like our current HDInsight service, customers can enjoy the automated deployment, SLA and comprehensive support but can now choose Windows or Ubuntu Linux when deploying from the Azure Portal.

This managed Linux service meets the same rigorous bar of enterprise grade quality, security and compliance as our other Azure services. Currently this service is available in four regions (2 in the US, 1 in Europe and 1 in Asia). We will be expanding the service footprint to all regions Azure in the next few months.

Today’s announcements marks another significant milestone in our progress for greater openness and adds to our ongoing efforts including Docker client work for Windows, open sourcing of .NET among other open source contributions. In Azure, we support customers to deploy Linux on Virtual Machines, we have contributed to numerous open source projects, like Docker, and now run a fully managed Linux service on the Azure infrastructure. We remain committed to delivering what customers want and we are excited to have you try out this brand new service.

We keep listening and look forward to hearing your feedback.

See ya around,

Corey