Microsoft announced an update to its Azure cloud service that adds support for developing on Azure using Node.js, among other new features and improvements Microsoft is also offering a limited preview of its Apache Hadoop service for Azure.

Microsoft has been working with Node.js sponsor company Joyent to bring the server side JavaScript development system to the Windows platform since June. Node.js joins .NET, PHP and Java as supported development platforms on Azure. Also included is Windows Azure PowerShell for Node.js, a command-line development and deployment tool that fits well with the growing DevOps trend. The Node.js library is available on Github.

The Hadoop support is only a technology preview, but Microsoft claims its installers can deploy Hadoop in hours instead of days.

Microsoft has been working with Hortonworks to improve Hadoop support on Windows. “We’re focused on evolving Hadoop so it is extensible, so if people want to bring value-add differentiation, it can be done well using the Open Source foundation,” Hortonworks CEO Eric Baldeschweiler recently told Wikibon analyst Bert Latamore in an interview for ServicesAngle. “So once Microsoft has Hadoop on Azure, Azure is a very differentiated service.”

Since embarking on this project with Hortonworks, Microsoft has discontinued development of LINQ for HPC (aka Dryad), one of its Hadoop alternatives – a huge vote of confidence in Hadoop on Microsoft’s part.

Notably it includes a set of JavaScript libraries to enable developers to write MapReduce jobs with JavaScript. In addition to support for Node.js, Microsoft has been pushing HTML5, JavaScript and CSS as a cross-platform development solution, instead of its own Silverlight stack. Microsoft has gone as far as to emphasize JavaScript et al as the development stack for its Metro framework on Windows 8.

In short, Microsoft is really doubling down on JavaScript as a development language, and it’s taking the language to both the server and to Hadoop. What that means for .NET developers remains to be seen, but it’s definitely a good time to be a JavaScript developer.