Advantage of using Windows Azure for MapReduce

Question

I'm trying to develop a MapReduce application using Hadoop which could run on top of Windows Azure .

ie: using the Windows Azure clusters to deploy.

I wanted to know what could be the advantages of going in with Windows Azure when compared to other cloud services such as Amazon EC2 , Google and so on.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Azure has 1 click cluster deployments, parternships with hadoop solution providers to optimize solutions on Azure, VPN capabilities for seamless hybrid solutions along with a plethora of other things.

You also get the ability to automate using Rest or Powershell APIs and built in automation and monitoring that can be predictive as well as re-active to autoscale on demand. The seperation of concerns from compute and storage enables you to stand up and tear down clusters on demand so you can pay for them only when you need to.

Beyond this, billing by the minute is also ideal for anybody reselling compute time on clusters running on Azure.