Microsoft cloud, following Amazon, adds stream processing to its big-data features

Microsoft is making its Azure public cloud capable of analyzing and processing huge flows of data as they come in, putting it in lockstep feature-wise with the other top public clouds around.

Today Microsoft revealed a preview of the Apache Storm open-source stream-processing system in the company’s HDInsight Hadoop portion of Azure.

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“By bringing real-time analytics capabilities to HDInsight, we are opening up new customer scenarios such as the ability to analyze operational data in real time for predictive maintenance,” T.K. Rengarajan, corporate vice president of data platform at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post announcing the preview today.

The feature addition follows the announcement a year ago of the Kinesis stream-processing service on the market-leading Amazon Web Services public cloud. In January Amazon followed up with a Storm connector. And in June, Google came forth with a stream processing system of its own, Cloud Dataflow. Now Microsoft is on the board, too.

The choice of backing Storm instead of some in-house alternative proves Microsoft’s continuing interest in backing well-implemented open-source tooling rather than its own proprietary technology. Even earlier today Microsoft released additional evidence of that position by saying that Docker support would be coming to Windows Server.

Azure, for its part, represents a real growth opportunity for Microsoft. Beyond talking frequently about this being a mobile-first and cloud-first world, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella has also expounded on the importance of introducing “more natural human-computing interfaces that empower all individuals.”

Now companies can join Microsoft in that endeavor and start building that style of smarter, more up-to-date applications on Azure, rather than tinkering with Storm in their own data centers. In the meantime, Microsoft can stay competitive in the highly competitive cloud-infrastructure business.