General availability: Spark on HDInsight

Today we're announcing general availability of Spark on Azure HDInsight. This release brings improvements in availability, scalability, and productivity to open-source Apache Spark. 

It's a common sentiment in the industry that big data becomes easier with Spark. Spark has fewer moving pieces and provides a more integrated platform for big-data workloads, from ETL to SQL to machine learning. In addition to that, Spark on Azure HDInsight brings:

• An industry-leading availability SLA of 99.9 percent, which makes it suitable for demanding enterprise workloads.
• A scalable storage layer via Azure Data Lake Store.
• Productivity tools for every phase of data exploration and development. Jupyter notebooks with a customized Spark kernel enable interactive data exploration. Integration with BI dashboards like Power BI, Tableau, and Qlik is good for quick data sharing and continuous reporting. The IntelliJ plug-in is a reliable option for long-term development and debugging of code artifacts.

For more information, check out the following links:

• Documentation: Overview of Apache Spark on HDInsight
• Announcement: Apache Spark for Azure HDInsight now generally available