With prior partnerships in place with Hortonworks Inc. and Cloudera Inc., Microsoft has now teamed up with MapR Technologies Inc., the final member of the “big three” distributors of Apache-Hadoop based software.

“Today, we are excited to announce that MapR will also be available in the summer as an option for customers to deploy Hadoop from the Azure Marketplace,” Microsoft exec T.K “Ranga” Rengarajan said in a blog post yesterday.

Hortonworks had been the primary Hadoop partner in the Azure cloud. The companies teamed up in 2011 to eventually offer the Azure-based HDInsight service, featuring the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) as the Hadoop distribution providing the software foundation. Hortonworks also developed the Hortonworks Data Platform for Windows, letting Windows users in on the traditionally Linux-based Hadoop ecosystem. HDP is also available as a virtual machine (VM) option in the Azure Marketplace.

Microsoft then added Cloudera to the Azure mix in October 2013, putting Cloudera Enterprise in the Azure Marketplace as another Hadoop-based option.

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How MapR Fits In (source: MapR Technologies Inc.)

Now, sometime this summer, the MapR Hadoop-based distribution will join the Azure Hadoop party.

“MapR is a leader in the Hadoop community that offers the MapR Distribution including Hadoop, which includes MapR-FS, an HDFS and POSIX compliant file store, and MapR-DB, a NoSQL key value store,” Rengarajan said. “The distribution also includes core Hadoop projects such as Hive, Impala, SparkSQL, and Drill, and MapR Control System, a comprehensive management system.”

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