Microsoft Big Data Solutions

Microsoft's Approach to Big Data

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:

• Recognizing Microsoft's Strategic Moves to Adopt Big Data
• Competing in the Hadoop Ecosystem
• Deciding How to Deploy Hadoop

In Chapter 1 we learned a bit about the various projects that comprise the Hadoop ecosystem. In this chapter we will focus on Microsoft's approach to big data and delve a bit deeper into the more competitive elements of the Hadoop. Finally, we'll look at some of the considerations when deploying Hadoop and evaluate our deployment options. We'll consider how these deployment factors might manifest themselves in our chosen topology and what, if anything, we can do to mitigate them.

A Story of “Better Together”

Back in 2011, at the PASS Summit Keynote, then Senior Vice President Ted Kummert formally announced the partnership with Hortonworks as a central tenet of Microsoft's strategy into the world of “big data.” It was quite a surprise.

Those of us who had been following Microsoft's efforts in this space were all waiting for Microsoft to release a proprietary product for distributed scale-out compute (for example, the Microsoft Research project known as Dryad). However, it was not to be. Microsoft elected to invest in this partnership and work with the open source community to enable Hadoop to run on Windows and work with Microsoft's tooling. It was more than a bold move. It was unprecedented. ...