When to use HDInsight
The biggest strength of HDInsight is the range of different configurations that the service offers. It enables you to support a wide variety of workloads. These workloads could be batch processing of data, working with streaming data, or managing data warehouses and/or data science workloads. This feature makes HDInsight a compelling choice, especially if your business process contains multiple workloads.
For example, if your organization only builds a data warehouse to present historical reports through Power BI, it may be pragmatic to use Azure SQL Data Warehouse with Power BI. Likewise, should your organization perform advance analytics with a data science solution and nothing more, then it may be appropriate to only use Azure Databricks.
However, if your organization's workloads involve ingesting data for historical reporting and advanced analytics, and you have streaming data that requires analysis, then HDInsight is a pragmatic choice. All the data can be ingested into a single Data Lake location. Then you can use the correct HDInsight configuration to manage Batch processing, Data Warehousing, Data Science operations, and Streaming workloads. As there is separation between the compute and the storage, this can be done seamlessly on top of the same data. Furthermore, you will be minimizing the cost of the storage as the operations are performed on a single rather than multiple data stores.
HDInsight differentiators
In addition to the scenarios outlined above. Below are key differentiators that make HDInsight ideal for Big Data workloads:
- Independently scalable compute and storage
- Autoscaling worker nodes based on workload or schedule
- Flexibility and fault tolerance of master nodes
- Enterprise Security
- SDK
Separation of compute and storage, along with automatic cluster scaling depending on workload or schedule, can lead to significant cost optimizations. HDInsight’s master nodes are resilient to failure. The master nodes are backed by fault tolerant virtual machines leading to a highly available service with an SLA of 99.9%. The Microsoft Entra integration has the enterprise security capabilities of authentication and authorization. These capabilities together with encryption and virtual network support give you granular control of who can access the data. HDInsight is backed by a variety of SDKs, which enable cluster creation and development in multiple languages in a variety of IDEs.