Microsoft Releases CentOS-Based 'Linux Data Science Virtual Machine' For Azure (betanews.com)

Posted by msmash on Thursday April 14, 2016 @05:40AM from the microsoft-linux-affair dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has announced a CentOS-based VM image for Azure called 'Linux Data Science Virtual Machine'. The VM has pre-installed tools such as Anaconda Python Distribution, Computational Network Toolkit, and Microsoft R Open. It focuses on machine learning and analytics, making it a great choice for data scientists. "Thanks to Azure's worldwide cloud infrastructure, customers now have on-demand access to a Linux environment to perform a wide range of data science tasks. The VM saves customers the time and effort of having to discover, install, configure and manage these tools individually. Hosting the data science VM on Azure ensures high availability, elastic capacity and a consistent set of tools to foster collaboration across your team", says Gopi Kumar, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Data Group.

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It's a nice toolset by Anonymous Coward · 2016-04-14 06:26 · Score: 2, Insightful

As someone who does a fair bit of (what the world now calls) data science --300GB/day of new stuff coming in -- I have to compliment Microsoft on the toolset they have chosen for this image. I know firsthand that it's a pain to set all that stuff up. Just getting that damned R kernel working for Jupyter has cost me many countless hours (albeit mainly on OSX).
There have been AWS scientific computing images available here and there over the last few years, but none have been all that great.