HDInsight Overview, Nov. 2023

Andrew analyzes and writes about Microsoft's data management, business intelligence, and machine learning solutions, as well as aspects of licensing... more

Azure HDInsight is a Microsoft cloud database service based on Apache’s Hadoop open-source software framework, a popular solution for managing and analyzing unstructured data. It is a PaaS offering that closely resembles an on-premises environment, where the customer has control over the cluster configuration and component deployment. HDInsight will most likely appeal to customers familiar with Hadoop who want to deploy multiple Hadoop configurations in a cloud provider or who have other data and applications already hosted in Azure.

The service competes with Microsoft cloud offerings that share many of the same frameworks, including Azure Databricks, Synapse Analytics, and the new Fabric analytics offering. HDInsight’s main differentiators include low-level controls, more customization options, and the ability to install customer-preferred tools.

HDInsight deployment configurations (called cluster types) are based on current releases of specific Apache open-source software frameworks (collaborative projects) that are designed for different workloads. Deployments are available using VMs or Kubernetes clusters.

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