HDInsight Stagnates: Time to Migrate

• HDInsight’s future is looking bleak as Microsoft abandons a major upgrade and retires key security features.
• The service relies on aging components, many of which are no longer supported by the communities that developed them.
• Customers should also abandon plans to adopt the service and actively develop migration projects to move to other services.

HDInsight, a Microsoft cloud service providing traditional Big Data components, has reached a critical point where customers should migrate away from the service. Although Microsoft has not announced HDInsight’s retirement, the company is no longer investing in HDInsight, has cancelled the next generation of the service (which was in preview), and is encouraging customers to migrate to a newer Microsoft solution, Fabric. The risks of continuing to use HDInsight are clear: Most of the components are no longer supported and vulnerable to security attacks, and Microsoft can retire the service with only 12 months’ notice. Customers should evaluate alternatives and migrate away from HDInsight or adapt their workloads to run on a newer platform.