Microsoft Research Releases Another Hadoop Alternative for Azure
From the post:
Today Microsoft Research announced the availability of a free technology preview of Project Daytona MapReduce Runtime for Windows Azure. Using a set of tools for working with big data based on Google’s MapReduce paper, it provides an alternative to Apache Hadoop.
Daytona was created by the eXtreme Computing Group at Microsoft Research. It’s designed to help scientists take advantage of Azure for working with large, unstructured data sets. Daytona is also being used to power a data-analytics-as-a-service offering the team calls Excel DataScope.
Excellent coverage of this latest release along with information about related software from Microsoft.
I don’t think anyone disputes that Hadoop is difficult to use effectively, so why not offer an MS product that makes Apache Hadoop easier to use? With all the consumer software skills at Microsoft it would still be a challenge but one that Microsoft would be the most likely candidate to overcome.
And that would give Microsoft a window (sorry) into non-Azure environments as well as an opportunity to promote an Excel-like interface. (Hard to argue against the familiar.)
We are going to reach the future of computing more quickly the fewer times we stop to build product silos.
Products yes, product silos, no.