Microsoft is all set to enter into some tough competition by cutting prices of its open-source analytics cloud service – Azure HDInsight.
The technology giant recently announced reducing prices to half, nearly 52%, for its Azure HDInsight services, along with some additional feature support.
“We are happy to announce that we are lowering the prices in Azure HDInsight. Customers will get even more value from their batch processing, interactive querying, machine learning, streaming analytics, and real-time analytics workloads on Azure HDInsight at a much lower price,” said Rimma Nehme, GPM, Azure Cosmos DB + Open Source Software Analytics, in an official blog.
Azure HDInsight is a fully managed and full spectrum, open-source analytics service based on Apache Hadoop, Spark, LLAP, Hive, Kalfa, HBase, and Microsoft R server.
Per the new pricing sheet, the new price will be effective from January 5, 2018. The price of Microsoft R Server has also been reduced by 80% and this brings per core hour cost to $0.016. Microsoft R Server users can now run R analytics workloads on Azure HDInsight at considerably lower cost.
Apart from the price cuts, Microsoft also announced the preview and general availability of various other HDInsight services:
– General availability of Azure Log Analytics integration, which will enable enterprise-grade monitoring for various mission-critical applications.
– Azure HDInsight’s Premium Cluster tier will be replaced with Enterprise Security Package, which will be in preview.
– Microsoft announced the general availability of Apache Kafka on Azure HDInsight that will enable customers to build open-source, enterprise-grade analytics solutions like fraud detection, social analytics, IoT and more.
– Microsoft made an announcement for public preview integration with Power BI direct query, allowing users to create dynamic reports based on their already stored data in Azure Blob storage and Data Lake.
– Java and Scala developers will now get additional development tools in the form of plugins for IntelliJ and Eclipse.
With this announcement, Microsoft will face direct competition from Amazon Web Services’ EMR (Elastic MapReduce) and Google’s Cloud Data Proc.
