Cloud distributions

Cloud services offer cost-effective solutions in terms of infrastructure setup, monitoring, and maintenance. A large number of organizations do prefer moving their Hadoop infrastructure to the cloud. There are a few popular distributions available for the cloud:

• Amazon's Elastic MapReduce: Before moving to Hadoop, Amazon had already acquired a large space on the cloud in their infrastructure setup. Amazon provides Elastic MapReduce and many other Hadoop ecosystem tools in their distribution. They have the s3 File System, which is another alternative to HDFS. They offer a cost-effective setup for Hadoop on cloud and it is currently the most actively used cloud on Hadoop distributions.
• Microsoft Azure: Microsoft offers HDInsight as a Hadoop distribution. It also offers a cost-effective solution for Hadoop infrastructure setup, monitoring and managing cluster resources. Azure claims to provide a fully cloud-based cluster with 99.9% Service Level Agreements (SLA).

Other big companies have also started providing Hadoop on cloud such as Google Cloud Platform, IBM BigInsight, and Cloudera Cloud. You may choose any distribution based on the feasibility and stability of Hadoop tools and components. Most companies offer a free trial for 1 year with lots of free credits for organizational use.