Microsoft believes big data is a "big deal". Hence, the company has been investing a lot in related technologies and communities, which help it improve its own machine learning development. At the ongoing big data and data science conference, Strata + Hadoop World, Microsoft has announced new cloud based offerings that will make it easier for data scientists to process big data.
The company has contributed to various open source data science projects and is a founding member of the R Consortium. Recently, it also revealed that SQL Server 2016 is headed to Linux, with support for big data analytics. Today, Microsoft announced the launch of R Server for HDInsight and an update to its Spark for HDInsight service, which is a managed implementation of the Apache Spark framework in Azure.
Microsoft has already revealed that more of its products and services will feature built-in support for R Services in the future and the latest of these services is Azure HDInsight. Using the cloud, the open-source R Server implementation will enable data scientists to leverage the power of additional memory and CPU cycles for their analytical needs. HDInsight will also be getting out-of-the-box support for popular big data applications such as Datameer Cloud and AtScale, which can be obtained from the Azure Marketplace.
In addition to these announcements, Microsoft also revealed that its enterprise metadata catalog, called "Azure Data Catalog", will be generally available starting tomorrow. With BUILD 2016 coming up, we can expect to learn more about the company"s plans for big data and machine learning in the next few days.
Source: Microsoft