From the Technet blogs area then this month we learn that the firm has now made R Server 9.0 (and R Client 2.0) generally available.
R itself is statistical programming language — so Microsoft R Server (MRS) is a big data analytics platform and route to analysing data at scale and building apps. As it stands today, R Server has been created from software that originates from Revolution Analytics, a company acquired by Microsoft in April 2015.
Operationalizing R
With the next version of R Server, Microsoft insists it is further operationalizing R (American Z left in for deliberate effect) and what this means is making R more attractive to enterprise application environment engineers, rather than ‘just’ attractive to data scientists.
MRS 9.0 improves on operationalization capabilities in terms of its ability to allowing users to get R models deployed efficiently, regardless of whether data resides on premises or in the cloud.
Battle-tested
MRS 9.0 takes best-of-breed ML algorithms that have been battle-tested by Microsoft on a variety of our products, and now makes them available for your use in the newMicrosoftML package. You can combine the algorithms delivered in this package with pre-existing parallel external memory algorithms such as the RevoScaleR package as well as open source innovations such as CRAN R packages to deliver the best predictive analytics,” Nagesh Pabbisetty, partner director of program management at Microsoft. MRS 9.0 also now supports Spark 2.0 (Apache Spark is a general engine for big data processing, with built-in modules for streaming, SQL, machine learning and graph processing) in addition to Spark 1.6 — and also adds support for Ubuntu. This then complements Microsoft’s support for SUSE and RedHat Linux.
