Microsoft (MSFT) will be bringing real-time analytics to Azure HDInsight. The company announced at Strata + Hadoop World a preview of Apache Storm on Azure HDInsight, providing Hadoop users with the ability to gain insights into events as they happen.

“As a managed cluster integrated into Azure HDInsight, Storm will have the benefit of being easy to set up (within a few clicks and a few minutes), having high availability (clusters are monitored 24/7 and under the Azure SLA for uptime), having elastic scale (where more resources can be added depending on need), and being integrated to the broad Azure ecosystem (i.e., Event Hubs, HBase, VNet, etc). In many cases, Storm will integrate with an event queuing system like Event Hubs or Apache Kafka,” wrote Oliver Chiu, product marketing for Hadoop/big data and data warehousing for Microsoft Azure, in a blog post.

Apache Storm is an open source project within the Hadoop project that provides users with access to an event-processing analytics platform. According to the project’s team, it can process millions of events in a reliable fashion.

The expansion of Azure’s data services is being touted by Microsoft executives as the next step in bringing big data to everyone via the cloud. T.K. Rengarajan, corporate vice president of Data Platforms at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post that HDInsight “combines the best of Hadoop open source technology with the elasticity and manageability enterprises require.” But the technology isn’t quite ready for general availability. The features are being rolled out in preview for now.

Microsoft also announced that partner HortonWorks has achieved Azure Certification for its HortonWorks Data Platform (HDP). The next version of HDP will provide hybrid data connectors for the extension of on-premise Hadoop deployments to Azure.