Microsoft yesterday made significant announcements around its Azure cloud platform, notably improved experiences for Node.js, MongoDB, Hadoop, Solr and Memcached. The goal, Microsoft said on its Port25 blog, is to allow developers to continue "to work in the languages and frameworks they already know." The company has created a new open-source Azure SDK for node.js, and has put Azure libraries for .NET, Java and node.js hosted on GitHub. Another highlight of the release is the limited preview of the Apache Hadoop distribution service on Azure. Many more details on the release can be found on the Azure team's blog.