Microsoft chooses Ubuntu as distro for HDInsight on Azure

Microsoft chooses Ubuntu on its Azure platform to offer its first Linux cloud service. Hadoop-based HDInsight will run on Ubuntu and Hortonworks. Microsoft says its goal is to bring big data to the masses.

HDInsight is Microsoft’s Hadoop service for big data analysis, which runs on Azure and now also works on Ubuntu as a software-as-a-service. With the partnership officially announced on Monday between Canonical and Microsoft, it should make it easier for customers to use both Linux and Windows within corporate environments, depending on the type of work. Both companies indicate that in this way a common goal of ‘hybrid cloud computing’ should be made easier.

According to Microsoft’s Linux-in-the-Cloud division, more than 20 percent of virtual machines on Azure today run on Linux. In addition, more than a thousand Linux images have already been deployed via VM Depot. The partnership between Microsoft and Canonical has been in public preview since February’s Strata + Hadoop World conference.