General availability: R Server on HDInsight

Today, R Server on Azure HDInsight is generally available. This release enables scalable machine learning in the R language on Azure HDInsight clusters, and it makes several new features available for the first time. The core capabilities of R Server address the gap between productivity of the R language in the area of statistics and requirements of many industries to run statistical and machine learning models on large datasets. R Server enables direct deployment of R models into production environments without the need to recode them in a different language—a common problem among data-science practitioners. The scale and robustness of R Server is delivered by a fast parallelized library of machine learning algorithms that uses Apache Spark to distribute computations over clusters of machines. This release of R Server on HDInsight includes the following features: * New version of Microsoft R Server 9.0.1 * Upgrade to Spark 2.0 * New RxHiveData and RxParquetData functions that enable R Server programs to directly access any Hadoop and Spark data source * Support for Azure Data Lake Store * Preinstalled R Studio Server Community Edition development tool For more information: * Watch new features in action in the [R Server on HDInsight video](https://channel9.msdn.com/events/connect/2016/187) (11 minutes). * Read the [R Server on HDInsight documentation](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/hdinsight/hdinsight-hadoop-r-server-get-started). * HDInsight * [ HDInsight](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/products/hdinsight/)