Archives
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Announcing General Availability of HDInsight on Linux + new Data Lake Services and Language
Today, I’m happy to announce several key additions to our big data services in Azure, including the General Availability of HDInsight on Linux, as well as the introduction of our new Azure Data Lake and Language services.
General Availability of HDInsight on Linux
Today we are announcing general availability of our HDInsight service on Ubuntu Linux. HDInsight enables you to easily run managed Hadoop clusters in the cloud. With today’s release we now allow you to configure these clusters to run using both a Windows Server Operating System as well as an Ubuntu based Linux Operating System.
HDInsight on Linux enables even broader support for Hadoop ecosystem partners to run in HDInsight providing you even greater choice of preferred tools and applications for running Hadoop workloads. Both Linux and Windows clusters in HDInsight are built on the same standard Hadoop distribution and offer the same set of rich capabilities.
Today’s new release also enables additional capabilities, such as, cluster scaling, virtual network integration and script action support. Furthermore, in addition to Hadoop cluster type, you can now create HBase and Storm clusters on Linux for your NoSQL and real time processing needs such as building an IoT application.
Create a cluster
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Online AzureCon Conference this Tuesday
This Tuesday, Sept 29th, we are hosting our online AzureCon event – which is a free online event with 60 technical sessions on Azure presented by both the Azure engineering team as well as MVPs and customers who use Azure today and will share their best practices.
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Better Density and Lower Prices for Azure’s SQL Elastic Database Pools
A few weeks ago, we announced the preview availability of the new Basic and Premium Elastic Database Pools Tiers with our Azure SQL Database service. Elastic Database Pools enable you to run multiple, isolated and independent databases that can be auto-scaled automatically across a private pool of resources dedicated to just you and your apps. This provides a great way for software-as-a-service (SaaS) developers to better isolate their individual customers in an economical way.
Today, we are announcing some nice changes to the pricing structure of Elastic Database Pools as well as changes to the density of elastic databases within a pool. These changes make it even more attractive to use Elastic Database Pools to build your applications.
Specifically, we are making the following changes:
- Finalizing the eDTU price – With Elastic Database Pools you purchase units of capacity that we can call eDTUs – which you can then use to run multiple databases within a pool. We have decided to not increase the price of eDTUs as we go from preview->GA. This means that you’ll be able to pay a much lower price (about 50% less) for eDTUs than many developers expected.
- Eliminating the per-database fee – In additional to lower eDTU prices, we are also eliminating the fee per database that we have had with the preview. This means you no longer need to pay a per-database charge to use an Elastic Database Pool, and makes the pricing much more attractive for scenarios where you want to have lots of small databases.
- Pool density – We are announcing increased density limits that enable you to run many more databases per Elastic Database pool. See the chart below under “Maximum databases per pool” for specifics. This change will take effect at the time of general availability, but you can design your apps around these numbers. The increase pool density limits will make Elastic Database Pools event more attractive.
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Announcing the Biggest VM Sizes Available in the Cloud: New Azure GS-VM Series
Today, we’re announcing the release of the new Azure GS-series of Virtual Machine sizes, which enable Azure Premium Storage to be used with Azure G-series VM sizes. These VM sizes are now available to use in both our US and Europe regions.
Earlier this year we released the G-series of Azure Virtual Machines – which provide the largest VM size provided by any public cloud provider. They provide up to 32-cores of CPU, 448 GB of memory and 6.59 TB of local SSD-based storage. Today’s release of the GS-series of Azure Virtual Machines enables you to now use these large VMs with Azure Premium Storage – and enables you to perform up to 2,000 MB/sec of storage throughput , more than double any other public cloud provider. Using the G5/GS5 VM size now also offers more than 20 gbps of network bandwidth, also more than double the network throughout provided by any other public cloud provider.
These new VM offerings provide an ideal solution to your most demanding cloud based workloads, and are great for relational databases like SQL Server, MySQL, PostGres and other large data warehouse solutions. You can also use the GS-series to significantly scale-up the performance of enterprise applications like Dynamics AX.
The G and GS-series of VM sizes are available to use now in our West US, East US-2, and West Europe Azure regions. You’ll see us continue to expand availability around the world in more regions in the coming months.
GS Series Size Details
The below table provides more details on the exact capabilities of the new GS-series of VM sizes:
