The next evolution of self-service analytics, cloud-based Hadoop is making a big splash at this week’s Strata Conference + Hadoop World 2013 summit in New York. Web hosting provider Rackspace was the first to jump on the bandwagon with a new service that lets users spin up and spin down Big Data clusters as needed.

The offering, which is available under the Rackspace Data Service umbrella of on-demand data solutions, gives customers the option of running the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) on Rackspace’s OpenStack-powered public cloud. The main selling point is the ability to use pre-customized configurations that, according to the company, simplify the deployment of implementations with specific requirements such as compute- or storage-intensive workloads.

John Engates, the CTO of Rackspace, commented that “running Hadoop on your own is complex, which is why we’re excited about our development efforts with Hortonworks. We believe Hortonworks as a collaborator brings a substantial advantage in technology, services and experience that will clearly benefit customers.”

Hortonworks made several new friends over the past few days days, including Revolution Analytics, which just released the latest version of its commercial R distribution. Revolution R Enterprise 7 adds stepwise regression functions, ensemble models, advanced visualizations and most notably, integration with HDP.

Not to be left behind, exiting Hortonworks ally Microsoft announced a new HDP-based distro that runs exclusively in the cloud. Generally available as of Monday, Windows Azure HDInsight is fully compatible with vanilla Hadoop and Microsoft’s business intelligence solutions, namely Excel, SQL Server and PowerBI.

On the Big Data security front, MapR announced that it has upgraded its own Hadoop distribution with native security authentication and authorization capabilities. The update comes on the heels of Cloudera’s push to integrate its software with Apache Accumulo, an ultra-secure key-value store originally developed for the NSA.