Microsoft has announced that after a year in beta status, Apache Kafka on Azure HDInsight is now ready for production use by enterprises. Apache Kafka is an open source tool for processing real-time streaming data. Azure HDInsight is Microsoft’s cloud computing big data platform. Raghav Mohan, a program manager at Microsoft Azure Big Data, explained, “HDInsight is a managed platform with a 99.9 percent SLA [service-level agreement] on open source workloads. With this addition, our enterprise customers no longer worry about managing Kafka clusters, as HDInsight manages and fixes the issues involved with running Kafka at an enterprise scale.”
Early users of Apache Kafka on Azure HDInsight include GE Healthcare and Microsoft itself.
Microsoft also announced that it is reducing Azure HDInsight prices by up to 52 percent.