Go ahead and deploy your Hadoop cluster in the cloud. Really. It can handle it.

Cloud computing providers and big data vendors have been working toward this moment for years, and it looks like the moment has finally come. Of all the news coming out of the Strata and Hadoop World shows taking place this week, the most compelling stuff all goes to prove this point. Here’s a quick recap of what was announced:

• [company]Cloudera[/company] is offering a tool called Director that makes it easier to manage a fully functional Cloudera Hadoop cluster on the Amazon Web Services cloud.
• The [company]Hortonworks[/company] Data Platform is now fully certified with Microsoft Azure, meaning users can run the same software and get the same experience as in their own data center.
• Further — presumably as a result of its longstanding partnership with Hortonworks — [company]Microsoft[/company]’s HDInsight Hadoop service now supports the Storm stream-processing framework.