This move from Microsoft will surely help its Azure service to be distinguishable in the ever-increasing crowd of public cloud providers with data services out there.

T. K. “Ranga” Rengarajan, Microsoft Data Platform corporate vice president, will be addressing us all about big data processing and analytics on Tuesday in his keynote speech at AzureCon, Microsoft’s free virtual event about Azure.

[Office 2016, Windows 10 in China, and more from Microsoft’s last week.]. HDFS is the scalable and distributed storage component of the popular Hadoop big data processing platform.

Canonical’s John Zannos dropped the news earlier today to inform us all that the Redmond company revealed the fact that starting today, September 28, their Azure HDInsight, an Apache Hadoop-based hosted service, would be powered by the Ubuntu Linux operating system and the Hortonworks Data Platform.

When Azure Data Lake was first revealed, it was plain Microsoft was set on making Azure a welcoming environment for enterprise big data applications. “The collaboration between Microsoft and Canonical to create the option to run Azure HDInsight workloads on Ubuntu for Windows gives Azure customers flexibility in their big data processing decisions, both on premise, and in the cloud”. Queries built with U-SQL can leverage the.Net runtime as well as conventional SQL expressions. 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.

Microsoft’s Visual Studio Tools, meanwhile, have been updated to build, debug and tune for Hive queries and Storm topologies running in HDInsight. It’s also supported by Hadoop ISV applications spanning security, governance, data preparation, and analytics that can be deployed from the Azure Marketplace.

“The analytics service for Azure Data Lake is cost-efficient because you only pay for your job when it is running, and support for Azure Active Directory lets you manage access and roles simply and integrates with your on-premises identity system”, he wrote on Microsoft’s SQL Server blog. Microsoft says it is now on general release with a 99.9 per cent uptime service level agreement.