Analytics

Azure offers several services that help process large data sets (Big Data) and extract information for reporting and analytic applications. HDInsight (see the “HDInsight” section in the chapter “Data Storage and Access“) provides an implementation of Hadoop, which can divide data into subsets and process them simultaneously. Azure Data Lake includes a storage service (see the “Data Lake” section in the chapter “Data Storage and Access“) and an Analytics component.

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 50% reduced-price preview state with no service level agreement for three months to a year before becoming generally available for production. (See the illustration “Analytics Services Dates“.)