Microsoft Delivers Easy Tools for Managing Hadoop Clusters on Azure

In its early incarnation, the Big Data trend--sorting and sifting large data sets with new tools in pursuit of surfacing meaningful angles on stored information--was an enterprise-only story, but now businesses of all sizes are looking into tools that can help them cull meaningful insights from the data they store. As we've noted, the open source Hadoop project has been one of the big drivers of this trend and many software front ends and supplementary tools for working with Hadoop are also appearing.

It may surprise some to learn that Microsoft is out with several such tools designed to help Windows Azure users deploy and manage Hadoop clusters. It's a sure sign that Microsoft sees the importance of embracing open source in the cloud.

 Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Server and Tools Business, has a blog post up announcing the new tools, noting the following:

"Today we also released a public preview of the new HDInsight Service for Windows Azure. HDInsight provides everything you need to quickly deploy, manage and use Hadoop clusters running on Windows Azure. If you have a Windows Azure account you can request access to the HDInsight Preview and then easily create an HDInsight cluster within the Windows Azure Management Portal. Within the Windows Azure Management Portal click the New button and select the new HDInsight service to create a Hadoop cluster.  Specify a name for the cluster, a password for logging into the cluster and the size of cluster you need."

Guthrie also supplies a visual tour through screenshots showing how the process works, and it looks very simple. 

It's also worth noting that if you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial.