Analytics

Azure offers several services that help process large data sets (Big Data) and extract information for reporting and analytic applications. HDInsight provides an implementation of Hadoop, which can divide data into subsets and process them simultaneously. Azure’s Machine Learning service simplifies the application of algorithms to data sets to predict trends and future outcomes. Other Azure services facilitate ingesting high volume event streams (such as those coming from large populations of sensors) and processing them in real time.

New Azure services are often introduced and typically remain in a reduced-price preview state for three months to a year before becoming generally available for production. (See the illustration “Analytics Services Dates“.)

HDInsight

Azure HDInsight is Microsoft’s cloud service based on Apache’s Hadoop. The Hadoop software framework is designed to speed processing of large data sets (often called Big Data) and improve reliability and cost by distributing processing across clusters of commodity computers. It has been used to compile statistics from Web server logs for ad targeting, construct large Web search indexes, and extract consumer trends from unstructured data, among other tasks.