Microsoft’s end goal is for Azure to become the best cloud platform for customers to run their data workloads.  This means Microsoft will provide customers the best environment to run their big data/Hadoop as well as a place where Microsoft can offer services with our unique point-of-view.  Specific decision points on using Hadoop is if the customer wants to use open source technologies or not.  Some of the benefits of running open source software (OSS) on Azure include:

• Quick installs
• Support
• Easy scale
• Products work together
• Don’t need to get your own hardware

To determine the cost savings by moving your OSS to Azure, see the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator.

Of course there are many benefits of using Microsoft products over OSS, such as ease of use, support, better security, easier to find people with skills, less frequent version updates, more stable (less bugs), more compatibility and integration between products, etc.  But there are still reasons to use OSS (i.e. cost, faster performance in some cases, more product selection and features), so I created a list that shows many of the Microsoft products and their equivalent, or close equivalent, Hadoop/OSS product.

I tried to list only Apache products unless there was no equivalent Apache product or there is a really popular Open Source Software (OSS) product (updated 1/30/21).

Microsoft Product	Hadoop/Open Source Software Product
Office365/Excel	OpenOffice/Calc
Cosmos DB	MongoDB, MarkLogic, HBase, Cassandra
SQL Database	SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Apache Ignite
Azure Data Lake Analytics/YARN	None
Azure VM/IaaS	OpenStack
Blob Storage	HDFS, Ceph (Note: These are distributed file systems and Blob storage is not distributed)
Azure HBase	Apache HBase (Azure HBase is a service wrapped around Apache HBase), Apache Trafodion
Event Hub	Apache Kafka
Azure Stream Analytics	Apache Storm, Apache Spark Streaming, Apache Flink, Apache Beam, Twitter Heron
Power BI/Reporting	Apache Zeppelin, Apache Jupyter, Airbnb Superset, Preset (pay), Kibana
Power BI/Cubing engine	Arcadia Data (pay)
HDInsight	Hortonworks (pay), Cloudera (pay), MapR (pay)
Azure ML (Machine Learning)	Apache Mahout, Apache Spark MLib, Apache PredictionIO
Microsoft R Open	R
Azure Synapse Analytics/Interactive queries	Apache Hive LLAP, Presto, Apache Spark SQL, Apache Drill, Apache Impala, Databricks SQL Analytics, Apache Arrow
IoT Hub	Apache NiFi
Azure Data Factory	Apache Falcon, Airbnb Airflow, Apache Oozie, Apache Azkaban, data build tool (dbt), dbt cloud (pay), Astronomer (pay), Prefect, Luigi, Argo, Kubeflow, Dagster, Flyte
Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2/WebHDFS	HDFS Ozone
Azure Analysis Services/SSAS	Apache Kylin, Apache Druid, AtScale (pay)
SQL Server Reporting Services	None
Hadoop Indexes	Jethro Data (pay)
Azure Purview	Apache Atlas, Amundsen
PolyBase	Apache Drill
Azure Cognitive Search	Apache Solr, Apache ElasticSearch (Azure Search build on ES)
SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)	Talend Open Studio, Pentaho Data Integration
Microsoft Common Data Model (Storage overlay)	Delta Lake, Apache Hudi, Apache Iceberg
Others	Apache Ambari (manage Hadoop clusters), Apache Ranger (data security such as row/column-level security), Apache Knox (secure entry point for Hadoop clusters), Apache Flume (collecting log data)

Many of the Hadoop/OSS products are available in Azure.  If you feel I’m missing some products from this list, please let me know as this is very subjective and comments are always welcome!