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This is part 2 of our June series for the Azure Community about announcements and updates from Build and Ignite conferences. Read part 1.
Data platform updates from Build and Ignite conferences
With all of the announcements and information that came out of our recent Build and Ignite conferences, we’re dedicating this month’s Azure Partner Community blog posts and June 18 call to bringing you our perspective on what news is valuable for you as a partner, what it means to your business, and how you can extend your existing practice to include new data platform releases and capabilities.
Apache Storm general availability
Microsoft has become more open in the way we work with and collaborate with others in the industry, contributing to and partnering with open source communities. This is evident in Azure and even more so in our big data solutions. We recently added support for Apache Storm on our HDInsight solution. Apache Storm is a widely used real-time event processing solution that was originally employed by Twitter to process their massive data streams. Storm is also very popular for processing telemetry in the Internet of Things space as well.
The general availability of Apache Storm means that partners working on big data solutions for their customers that include Storm can deploy them in a Platform as a Service solution that allows for faster development and scalability. It also provides you with an opportunity to develop intellectual property based on Storm, creating a repeatable model for fixed price, high-margin offerings. Your expertise can be valuable to customers that want to make better use of the volumes of data they are collecting.
- Apache Storm on HDInsight general availability announcement
- Apache Storm tutorial
- Watch this video about what’s new with the Azure Storm Service
Azure SQL Database enhancements
The number of examples of the power of Azure SQL Database continues to grow, with some customers managing dozens of terabytes of data, across a few hundred thousand databases, processing millions of logins per day. The scale and performance achievable on Azure SQL Database is impressive, and some of the updates discussed at Build, like Azure SQL Database elastic database, Transparent Data Encryption, and Full-Text Search, are worth highlighting.
Read about these updates on the Azure blog. What’s notable about these updates is that they show our cloud-based data platform is approaching feature parity with the on-premises products. This is important for partners as they architect solutions for customers—cloud options can now support any workload, while providing the security and auditing functions needed for compliance.
Azure Data Lake
A significant challenge faced by businesses today is related to the explosion of data they must manage. The data often come from a variety of sources, and businesses have to deal with complexity in managing the systems that access those data sources. Azure Data Lake addresses this complexity, providing an HDFS compatible storage location with no limits and low latency. This scalable solution stores a vast amount of data that can be accessed by various systems that include HDInsight, Revolution Analytics, Hadoop, Cloudera, and others. Azure Data Lake is designed to handle a broad range of file sizes, from petabyte to the smallest files created from IoT devices.
For partners, this is not only a good fit for many of the challenges your customers are facing, but also gives you the opportunity to create managed services around Azure Data Lake. Those services could include the care of feeding of the accessing systems, or even the automation of scaling to help a customer optimize the costs of running their big data infrastructure.
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Azure SQL Data Warehouse
While we have provided data warehouse capabilities in the cloud through our Infrastructure as a Service offering, Azure SQL Data Warehouse moves that functionality to a Platform as a Service offering. It is the first cloud data warehouse that can process structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data while providing high performance through massive parallel processing.
For partners, SQL Data Warehouse means that you’ll be able to reduce a customer’s time to market with a solution that’s available in minutes, instead of the weeks that traditional hardware solutions typically require.
Here are the key differentiators between Azure SQL Data Warehouse and AWS Redshift, a comparison shared by Scott Guthrie at Build.
Azure SQL Data Warehouse | AWS Redshift | |
Pricing | Independently adjust compute + storage | Fixed compute/storage ratio |
Elasticity | Grow/Shrink in seconds | Hour to days to resize |
Pause/resume | Yes | No |
Hybrid | Yes. Azure and on-premises | No. AWS only |
Compatibility | True SQL Support | No support for indexes, SQL UDFs, stored procedures, constraints |
Find technical resources in the Azure Partner Readiness Catalog
The Azure Partner Readiness Catalog is a new project that we have been working on populating with some great information. It provides curated content from across various sources across the web. Please check it out at http://aka.ms/aprc.
Recommended videos
Big Data Analytics with HDInsight: Storm Essentials
Azure SQL Data Warehouse Overview
Azure SQL Data Warehouse: Deep Dive
Microsoft Azure SQL Database: Overview and Customer Scenarios
Elastic Scale for Microsoft Azure SQL Database
| Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.  | In the remaining June posts, and in our June 18 community call, we’ll cover the latest announcements about Microsoft Azure, and talk about what they mean for partners. |
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