Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 2
Microsoft's Approach to Big Data
What You Will Learn in This Chapter
• Recognizing Microsoft's Strategic Moves to Adopt Big Data
• Competing in the Hadoop Ecosystem
• Deciding How to Deploy Hadoop
In Chapter 1 we learned a bit about the various projects that comprise the
Hadoop ecosystem. In this chapter we will focus on Microsoft's approach to
big data and delve a bit deeper into the more competitive elements of the
Hadoop. Finally, we'll look at some of the considerations when deploying
Hadoop and evaluate our deployment options. We'll consider how these
deployment factors might manifest themselves in our chosen topology and
what, if anything, we can do to mitigate them.
A Story of “Better Together”
Back in 2011, at the PASS Summit Keynote, then Senior Vice President Ted
Kummert formally announced thepartnership with Hortonworks asacentral
tenet of Microsoft's strategy into the world of “big data.” It was quite a
surprise.
Those of us who had been following Microsoft's efforts in this space were
all waiting for Microsoft to release a proprietary product for distributed
scale-out compute (for example, the Microsoft Research project known as
Dryad). However, it was not to be. Microsoft elected to invest in this
partnership and work with the open source community to enable Hadoop to
run on Windows and work with Microsoft's tooling. It was more than a bold
move. It was unprecedented.
Later that week, Dave DeWitt commented in his keynote Q&A that the
“market had already spoken” and had chosen Hadoop. This was a great
insight into Microsoft's rationale; they were too late to launch their own
product. However, this is just the beginning of the story. Competition is rife,
andalthoughHadoop'scoreisopensource,anumberofproprietaryproducts
have emerged that are built on top of Hadoop. Will Microsoft ever build any
