Microsoft today announced the support for multiple versions of R and Python in Azure ML. In general, date scientists want to use the latest runtime and package versions which have the newest features and bug fixes. Meanwhile, they will have existing production models that they have to maintain and that rely on older versions. Azure ML tried to solve this issue partially by providing a stable, backwards-compatible runtime for your R and Python models, both for experimentation and operationalization as a web service. However, it was limited to a single version of each runtime and packages that were compatible with that runtime. With this latest update, Azure ML now supports multiple R and Python versions.
You can choose a newer version when building a new experiment, or you can update existing scripts to run under a newer version. Or you can keep using an old version if your legacy model depends on it. The supported versions include:
- CRAN R 3.1.0
- Microsoft R Open 3.2.2
- Python 2.7.7 with Anaconda 2.0 distribution
- Python 2.7.11 with Anaconda 4.0 distribution
- Python 3.5 with Anaconda 4.0 distribution.
Read more about it here.