Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 3
Provisioning Your HDInsight
Service Cluster
The HDInsight Service brings you the simplicity of deploying and managing your Hadoop clusters in the cloud, and
it enables you to do that in a matter of just a few minutes. Enterprises can now free themselves of the considerable
cost and effort of configuring, deploying, and managing Hadoop clusters for their data-mining needs. As a part of its
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings, HDInsight also provides a cost-efficient approach to managing and storing
data. The HDInsight Service uses Windows Azure blob storage as the default file system.
■
An Azure storage account is required to provision a cluster. The storage account you associate with your cluster
is where you will store the data that you will analyze in HDInsight.
Note
Creating the Storage Account
You can have multiple storage accounts under your Azure subscription. You can choose any of the existing storage
accounts you already have where you want to persist your HDInsight clusters' data, but it is always a good practice to
have dedicated storage accounts for each of your Azure services. You can even choose to have your storage accounts
in different data centers distributed geographically to reduce the impact on the rest of the services in the unlikely
event that a data center goes down.
To create a storage account, log on to your Windows Azure Management Portal (
https://manage.windowsazure.com
)
and navigate to the storage section as shown in Figure
3-1
.
