We're serious about supporting open-source big data on Azure, says Microsoft
'We want to support all the tools and frameworks our customers are using' says data platform marketing director Tiffany Wissner
Microsoft's senior director of data platform marketing, Tiffany Wissner, says that the company's conversion to the open-source cause is genuine and customers have no need to fear about being locked into a proprietary platform when they deploy big data services on the company's Azure IaaS cloud platform.
In the past Microsoft was openly hostile to the open-source software movement, but cloud computing, especially hybrid cloud, has changed the rules of the game. It is no longer possible for one company to monopolise the underlying computing platform, as Microsoft once did with Windows, making it difficult for rival operating systems to co-exist with it.
Microsoft's decision to enable users to run Linux on Azure dates back to 2012 when it added support for Ubuntu, Suse and CentOS distributions on Azure - having discovered that on rival Amazon's EC2 cloud businesses were deploying Linux instances in greater numbers than Windows ones.
At about the same time interest in big data processing on the Apache Hadoop platform was growing, and in 2011 Microsoft forged a partnership with then-start-up Hortonworks to certify the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) for Azure. The results of this collaboration, Azure HDInsight, emerged in 2013, with Hadoop offered as a service in the Azure Marketplace based on a choice of Linux or Windows clusters.
Wissner said there was no overarching strategy to support Linux and Hadoop at the same time, but rather that the two projects "converged together".
"Microsoft has been investing in Linux on Azure for the past three years and in that same window we've been investing in bringing Hadoop to cloud, so it made a lot of sense to bring them together and offer HDInsight on Linux specifically in Azure," she said.
As well as the Hortonworks HDP distribution that forms the core of HDInsight, rival Cloudera CDH is also supported on Azure, with a partnership between the two firms being signed in October last year. However, the third of the Hadoop "big three", MapR, is not supported as yet.
Wissner points to the diversification of open-source offerings available as a service on Azure as evidence that Microsoft is serious about its new direction and is not trying to lock customers in.
"We've been supporting Linux on Azure for three years and that's something we've continued to expand. We want to support all the tools and frameworks our customers are using and we have increased our investment over time in having greater numbers of partners in the cloud. Customers can look at that as an example of what our strategy is, to make areas like big data accessible," she said.
Microsoft also offers support for open-source NoSQL databases MongoDB, CouchDB and Cloudant in the Azure Marketplace alongside Microsoft's own DocumentDB document store, Wissner said, and Storm was recently added to HDInsight, along with support for Docker "to enable developers to use the tools they want and take advantage of our investments in partnerships and DevOps use in Visual Studio."
However, there are some notable absences in Microsoft's support for open-source players on the Azure Marketplace, perhaps most obviously Red Hat, one of the largest enterprise Linux distributions. Isn't this omission likely to drive customers into the arms of AWS?
"We talked to customers about how we could bring Linux to market in the quickest timeframe and customers told us they were using the Ubuntu distribution ... but that doesn't mean we will not think about other distributions in the future," Wissner said.
A similar question could be asked about support for the PostgreSQL SQL database. While MySQL is supported through a partnership with ClearDB there is no such fully-featured support available for Postgres.
Asked about the ongoing debate in both the EU and US about the FISA laws, Safe Harbour and the Patriot Act as they affect all US cloud companies, Wissner said she was not the right person to comment.
"Security is top of mind. We continue to make investment into security and compliance and working with our customers in relation to regulations in that regard, how to best use data on Azure," she stated.