HDInsight is an implementation of the Apache Hadoop technology stack on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform: It is based on the Hortonworks Hadoop distribution. Microsoft Azure HDInsight includes implementations of Apache Spark, HBase, Storm, Pig, Hive, Sqoop, Oozie, Ambari, etc. It also integrates with with business intelligence (BI) tools such as Power BI, Excel, SQL Server Analysis Services, and SQL Server Reporting Services.
Well suited: To most of the local run of datasets and non-prod systems - scalability is not a problem at all. Including data from multiple types of data sources is an added advantage. MLlib is a decently nice built-in library that can be used for most of the ML tasks. Less appropriate: We had to work on a RecSys where the music dataset that we used was around 300+Gb in size. We faced memory-based issues. Few times we also got memory errors. Also the MLlib library does not have support for advanced analytics and deep-learning frameworks support. Understanding the internals of the working of Apache Spark for beginners is highly not possible.
If you want to save costs and just pay for what you use, I highly recommend it. It will help you also to work with data for your reports and analytics. on the other hand I think it could be the subscription you have but high volume of data make it slow but not so much. anyway I think it's really good because it's from Microsoft which always is friendly to use it as all the suit they have.
The only problem I have come across is when loading large volumes of data I sometimes get an error message, I assume this means something is corrupt from within. I would love a way for this to be resolved without having to start over.
The only thing I dislike about spark's usability is the learning curve, there are many actions and transformations, however, its wide-range of uses for ETL processing, facility to integrate and it's multi-language support make this library a powerhouse for your data science solutions. It has especially aided us with its lightning-fast processing times.
Azure HDInsight is usable on the top of Azure Data Lake and gives us the benefit of analyzing large scale data workload in Hadoop. Usability and support from Microsoft are outstanding.
1. It integrates very well with scala or python. 2. It's very easy to understand SQL interoperability. 3. Apache is way faster than the other competitive technologies. 4. The support from the Apache community is very huge for Spark. 5. Execution times are faster as compared to others. 6. There are a large number of forums available for Apache Spark. 7. The code availability for Apache Spark is simpler and easy to gain access to. 8. Many organizations use Apache Spark, so many solutions are available for existing applications.
All the above systems work quite well on big data transformations whereas Spark really shines with its bigger API support and its ability to read from and write to multiple data sources. Using Spark one can easily switch between declarative versus imperative versus functional type programming easily based on the situation. Also it doesn't need special data ingestion or indexing pre-processing like Presto. Combining it with Jupyter Notebooks (https://github.com/jupyter-incubator/sparkmagic), one can develop the Spark code in an interactive manner in Scala or Python
At this time I have not used any other similar products... I am open to it but Azure HDInsight and its components really work well for our organization.
Faster turn around on feature development, we have seen a noticeable improvement in our agile development since using Spark.
Easy adoption, having multiple departments use the same underlying technology even if the use cases are very different allows for more commonality amongst applications which definitely makes the operations team happy.
Performance, we have been able to make some applications run over 20x faster since switching to Spark. This has saved us time, headaches, and operating costs.
