Microsoft Azure now offers open source ‘Linux Data Science Virtual Machine’

Microsoft has announced the availability of the ‘Linux Data Science Virtual Machine’ on its Azure marketplace. The launch of the new Virtual Machine (VM) image emerges months after the arrival of the Windows Data Science Virtual Machine.

To offer a full-fledged open source experience, Microsoft has used the OpenLogic CentOS-based Linux version 7.2. The VM image also comes bundled with some useful data science tools that are supposedly used by data scientists, developers, educators and researchers. “The Linux Data Science Virtual Machine provides you with a very productive Linux analytics environment where you can rapidly build advanced analytics solutions for deployment either to the cloud, onpremises or in a hybrid environment,” wrote Gopi Kumar, senior program manager — Microsoft Data Group, in a blog post. Apart from the standard Linux utilities and the shell, the new VM image has tools such as Microsoft R Open, Anaconda Python Distribution with Python 2.7 and 3.5, Jupyter Notebooks with Python, and R kernel. Microsoft has also provided the Azure command line interface to let you manage your existing Azure resources. Azure Storage Explorer, Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK), Vowpal Wabbit, XGBoost, Rattle and access to Azure ML are all pre-installed.

You can use development tools such as Azure SDK in Java, Python, Node.js, Ruby or the Eclipse IDE, with the Azure Toolkit plugin to work on the new Linux VM image. Besides, there is an option to enable remote access directly through an SSH client.

Microsoft claims that you can start your data science VM and perform data exploration or modelling within just 15 minutes of its subscription. This seems to be in line with installing the Linux operating system on a traditional machine.

You can use the new data science VM to perform some advanced analytics, build smart applications, run data science classes or even to host hackathons and competitions. It provides users full administrative access and leverages Microsoft Azure and Cortana to enable advanced analytics solutions.

Adopting open source wasn’t Microsoft’s initial aim, but the swift growth of FOSS in the world of computing devices has started influencing the software giant to develop new open source solutions.