General availability: R Server on HDInsight

Today, R Server on Azure HDInsight is generally available. This release enables scalable machine learning in the R language on Azure HDInsight clusters, and it makes several new features available for the first time.

The core capabilities of R Server address the gap between productivity of the R language in the area of statistics and requirements of many industries to run statistical and machine learning models on large datasets. R Server enables direct deployment of R models into production environments without the need to recode them in a different language—a common problem among data-science practitioners. The scale and robustness of R Server is delivered by a fast parallelized library of machine learning algorithms that uses Apache Spark to distribute computations over clusters of machines. This release of R Server on HDInsight includes the following features:

• New version of Microsoft R Server 9.0.1
• Upgrade to Spark 2.0
• New RxHiveData and RxParquetData functions that enable R Server programs to directly access any Hadoop and Spark data source
• Support for Azure Data Lake Store
• Preinstalled R Studio Server Community Edition development tool

For more information:

• Watch new features in action in the R Server on HDInsight video (11 minutes).
• Read the R Server on HDInsight documentation.