Hadoop 2.4 in preview for Azure users and more Microsoft cloud news

Microsoft rolled out a number of new Azure features and capabilities during the week of June 2.

Here's a round-up based on various Microsoft blog posts from this past week:

• Microsoft made available a preview of Hadoop 2.4 for its HDInsight service customers. (HDInsight is Microsoft's Hadoop on Azure implementation.) Microsoft officials say that the 2.4 version enables "massive query response time improvements of up to 100 times."
  
• Microsoft also is making available a preview of Apache HBase clusters inside Azure HDInsight. HBase is a NoSQL database component of Hadoop and was built to run on top of the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). With the preview, users can run HBase as a managed cluster in the cloud as an integrated piece of HDInsight.
  
• Microsoft's Azure Brazil South region is now generally available, after being made available in public preview form as of early 2014.
  
• Microsoft has expanded support for virtual networks and virtual machines on Azure as of June 5. Now Azure Virtual Network, one of Microsoft's networking services for connecting on-premises and cloud datacenters, can span an entire region. And A8 and A9 virtual machines with faster processors, interconnect and more virtual cores are generally available. Microsoft execs say the combination of these two sets of features are now better able to run compute- and network-intensive applications like video encoding, engineering design and simulation and more.
  
• Microsoft also expanded Azure Mobile Services' offline features to include Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android.