Raghu Ramakrishnan just posted about what we’ve been up to at Microsoft in the last few years:

Microsoft just announced Microsoft Azure Data Lake, a set of big data storage and analytics services including Azure HDInsight that enables developers, data scientists and analysts to perform all types of processing and analytics on data of any size or shape and across multiple platforms and programming languages. (See Azure Data Lake landing page, Azure Data Lake signup page, Azure Data Lake blog.)

And, I would be remiss not to highlight the mention of Apache REEF:

Given our extensive development on YARN, we conceived and developed REEF at Microsoft to ease building of Java and C# applications on YARN and other resource managers. It has since been incubated at Apache and attracted numerous committers from several academic and commercial organizations.

Beyond Azure Data Lake, we used REEF to build Azure Stream Analytics at Microsoft. And, maybe more relevant to the readers of this, it is the backend of several publications. Consider using it for your next distributed systems project. Microsoft and its partners in the Apache REEF community are kind enough to battle-test it for you :-)