Due to the complexity, high cost of operations, and unscalable infrastructure, on-premises Hadoop platforms have often not delivered on their initial promises to impact business value. As a result, many enterprises are now seeking to modernize their Hadoop platforms to cloud data platforms. Catalysts include:

• High cost of ownership: On-premises hardware is costly and potential is never realized.
• End-of-life and expiring licenses: Do you renew or migrate?
• End of support: Customers are forced to upgrade or buy new hardware.

Customers are now turning to Azure Databricks. Azure Databricks is a unified data analytics platform for accelerating innovation across data science, data engineering, and business analytics. Azure Databricks brings a cost-effective and scalable solution to managing Hadoop workloads in the cloud—one that is easy to manage, highly reliable for diverse data types, and enables predictive and real-time insights to drive innovation.

Azure Databricks is the best place to migrate your Hadoop workloads

Migrating your Hadoop workloads to Azure Databricks brings cost management, scalability, reliability for all data types, and the ability to apply advanced analytics for deeper insights. Microsoft Azure provides a fully managed cloud platform that reliably handles all types of data with Delta Lake within Azure Databricks. The Databricks runtime engine is a highly optimized, highly performant-tuned Spark version deployed on Azure as a managed service. Databricks offers elastic auto-scalability powered by Azure. Customers can scale up or down based on workload to deliver the most cost-effective scale and performance in the cloud. With Azure Databricks, AI frameworks, including TensorFlow, Keras, and PyTorch, are available in one place. Access them using Python or Scala notebooks, all in an accessible, shared notebook. These capabilities are not possible in an on-premises environment.

Azure Databricks isn’t just the best destination for Hadoop migrations, it is also the best destination for all Databricks workloads. Azure Databricks is the only first-party service providing customers with benefits not offered in any other cloud. First-party integration and our unique strategic alliance save customers time and effort and significantly accelerate time to value. As Forrester notes, “the competitive advantage is no longer about ‘first to market’, it’s (now about) ‘first to value.’”¹

Azure Databricks empowers customers to be first to value for these five reasons:

1. Unique engineering partnership

The Azure and Databricks engineering teams deepen the integration of Databricks within Azure to enable rapid customer success. Both engineering teams have spent hundreds of thousands of hours optimizing Databricks for Azure. This collaboration drives a highly performant level of cloud-scale operations that would not be possible otherwise. Since Azure Databricks is a first-party service, the Azure Databricks engineering team can optimize the offering across storage, networking, and compute to Azure customers’ benefit. Customers also get access to new innovations, like the exclusive preview of the new Photon engine, before they are available elsewhere.

2. Mission-critical support and ease for commerce

Azure Databricks customers receive enterprise-level support from a single place instead of the bifurcated model they would experience elsewhere. This is important for customers running mission-critical workloads with Databricks. With Azure Databricks, customers also benefit from a streamlined licensing process. Azure customers can start using Azure Databricks immediately, with no additional licenses to sign or procure. This is in addition to receiving a single bill, greatly simplifying the customer experience, and providing the level of support and predictability customers expect from their cloud providers.

3. Azure ecosystem

Azure Databricks is fully integrated with the vast portfolio of products and services in the Microsoft Azure ecosystem, accelerating customers’ time to value. The joint engineering effort ensures seamless integration of Azure Databricks with services such as Azure Event Hubs, Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure IoT Hub. As showcased in our Ingestion, ETL, and stream processing pipelines architecture, Azure Databricks ingests data in a simple, open, and collaborative way. By building a data streaming solution with Azure Databricks, Providence Health Care unlocked real-time analytics capabilities to ease hospital overcrowding. Additionally, the highly optimized Azure Synapse connector is the most popular service connector across all of Databricks. The combination of these services operating seamlessly together reinforces Azure as the preferred destination for running mission-critical analytics workloads with Databricks.

4. Native security, identity, and compliance

Azure Databricks provides enterprise-grade Azure security, including Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) integration, role-based access controls, and service-level agreements (SLAs) that protect your data and your business. Native integration with Azure AD enables a customer to run complete Azure-based solutions using Azure Databricks from the moment an Azure Databricks workspace is deployed. This is a zero-touch experience compared to stitching together a separate, stand-alone authentication solution after deploying a workspace. The identity and access management propagates throughout all other Azure services in the solution and flows between other Azure services in your solution, which means less work and less time to get a solution up and running.

Azure Databricks is the only Databricks environment with the FedRAMP High Authorization along with 12 other security certifications. This authorization provides customers assurance that Azure Databricks is designed to meet U.S. Government security and compliance requirements to support their sensitive analytics and data science workloads. You can use Azure Databricks with confidence in regulated industries such as healthcare, life sciences, and financial services.

5. Rapid onboarding

Azure Databricks makes it easy to get started. With a few clicks, data teams can set up an Azure Databricks workspace. They can collaborate across teams and access other needed services immediately through the Azure portal. Azure Databricks provides an easy path to get started and is available to customers around the world in 35 Azure regions.

Get started today

Only Azure offers Databricks as a first-party service, presenting a compelling choice among cloud vendor options. Learn more about how you can take advantage of these benefits today. Get started with our free trial experience.

¹Forrester, Your Business Is Only As Fast As Your Data, Michelle Goetz, 15 January 2021