Canonical, through John Zannos, VP Cloud Alliances, has proudly announced today, February 19, that the first ever Microsoft Azure hosted service will run on Linux, Ubuntu more specifically. This piece of news comes hot from the Strata + Hadoop World Conference, which takes place this week in California, USA.

The fact of the matter is that the news came from Microsoft, who announced the preview of Azure HDInsight on Ubuntu clusters yesterday, February 18, at the said event. This is definitely great news for Canonical, as their Ubuntu Linux operating system is getting recognized for being extremely reliable when handling Big Data.

Ubuntu is now the leading cloud and scale-out Linux kernel-based operating system, used by more and more companies from all over the world for running Big Data solutions. It can be used to effortlessly test, deploy, manage and scale Big Data architectures, thanks to Canonical's number one cloud orchestration tool, Juju. You can try public preview of Azure HDInsight on Ubuntu Linux right now.

Microsoft’s Azure HDInsight is an Apache Hadoop-based hosted service

Microsoft’s Azure HDInsight is an Apache Hadoop-based hosted service that runs in the Azure cloud, as Joseph Sirosh, Corporate Vice President, Machine Learning, and Ranga Rengarajan, Corporate Vice President, Data Platform at Microsoft announced at the Strata Conference event.

“This is particularly compelling for people that already use Hadoop on Linux on-premises like on Hortonworks Data Platform, because they can use common Linux tools, documentation, and templates and extend their deployment to Azure with hybrid cloud connections.” was stated in Canonical’s announcement today.

Azure HDInsight is used with great success by major companies

Azure HDInsight is used with great success by some of major companies, including Virginia Tech, Mediatonic, and Chr. Hanson, to discover essential data insights. The service has been created from the ground up to make it easy for customers to evaluate petabytes of data of any kind without spending a fortune on useless technologies. With Azure HDInsight, developers will be able to use their favorite programming languages without any hustle.

Strata + Hadoop World 2015, also known as Strata Conference, is an event that takes place in various corners of the world in different periods of time, the next one being held in London, England, between May 5 and 7. There, people from all over the world get together to learn more about new technologies and the business of big data.