Even after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella proclaimed Microsoft loved Linux and Microsoft released a specialized Linux for switches, Azure Cloud Switch, many don’t buy that Microsoft believes in Linux.

The analytics system for Data Lake Store – named appropriately enough Apache Data Lake Analytics – stores data in the same HDFS format as Hadoop itself, but also allows data to be pulled in from other Azure sources, such as Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

Azure Data Lake Analytics is a significant move for Microsoft, which at a high level is keen on building “the intelligent cloud platform.” Also, Azure Data Lake utilizes a new Microsoft-built query language which is essentially a fusion between SQL and C#.The new query language that this analytics service utilizes is called U-SQL and it derives primarily, as already stated, from the widely used SQL query language and Microsoft’s C# programming language.

Azure Data Lake removes the complexities of ingesting and storing all of your data while making it faster to get up and running with batch, streaming, and interactive analytics, said Rengarajan.

After revealing Azure Cloud Switch, a Linux kernel-based operating system for developing software products for network devices, Microsoft just announced that they decided to choose Ubuntu for their first Linux-based Azure offering. The data repository handles data of any size, type, and speed.

We know that many developers and data scientists struggle to be successful with big data using existing technologies and tools. This service will be available in preview later this year and includes U-SQL, a language that unifies the benefits of SQL with the expressive power of user code. It scales dynamically so that customers can focus on their business goals, not on managing distributed infrastructure, according to T K Rengarajan, corporate vice president for data platforms at Microsoft.

Microsoft adds the Azure Data Lake is supported by Azure Data Lake Tools for Visual Studio, which have been created to foster an integrated development environment across the Azure Data Lake.

Microsoft also announced the general availability of managed clusters for its Azure HDInsight service on Linux, which the company claims has a 99.9 percent uptime SLA. It’s also supported by Hadoop ISV applications spanning security, governance, data preparation, and analytics that can be deployed from the Azure Marketplace. As of today, Azure HDInsight on Linux is generally available.