Databricks has announced general availability of Microsoft Azure Databricks. Azure Databricks is Databricks' Unified Analytics Platform powered by Apache Spark. It is being offered as an integrated service within the Azure cloud platform.
Designed by Databricks in collaboration with Microsoft, Azure Databricks combines Databricks' Spark-based cloud service and Azure to help customers set up, streamlined workflows and an interactive workspace between data scientists, data engineers, and business analysts.
The integrated service provides Databricks' Unified Analytics Platform integrated with the Azure cloud platform, encompassing the Azure Portal; Azure Active Directory; and other data services on Azure, including Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Data Lake Store; and Microsoft Power BI. Azure Databricks was launched into preview in November 2017 during Microsoft Connect.
Over the past five years, Apache Spark has emerged as the open source standard for advanced analytics, machine learning and AI on Big Data. With a community of over 1,000 contributors and the rapid adoption by enterprises, Spark's popularity has been rising. Our goal with Azure Databricks, designed in collaboration with the founders of Apache Spark, is to help customers accelerate innovation and simplify the process of building Big Data & AI solutions by combining the best of Databricks and Azure, said company.
“Microsoft Azure Databricks has proven to be the most efficient way for us to meet customer demand for Spark on Azure. We experienced a lot of interest and engagement in the preview from organizations in need of a high-performance analytics platform based on Spark. With Azure Databricks, deeply integrated with services like Azure SQL Data Warehouse, our customers are now positioned to increase productivity and collaboration and globally scale analytics and data science projects on a trusted, secure cloud environment,” said Rohan Kumar, corporate vice president, Azure Data, Microsoft Corp.
“Our collaboration with Microsoft builds on our momentum as a leading cloud platform for Apache Spark-based analytics. The ability to provide our Unified Analytics Platform to all Microsoft Azure users in such an integrated fashion is invaluable to end users looking to simplify big data and AI,” said Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks.
