Qubole now offers HBase on AWS as a Platform as a Service product:
Scheduled Backups and Restore to any cluster: HBase data is backed up to S3 regularly, and you can use Qubole’s cluster management UI to easily configure schedules for your backups. All the data or specific tables can be restored to any other HBase cluster. This feature is not only useful for disaster recovery but also to bring up test or dev clusters as well as clusters for one-off analysis.
Cluster Management: HBase clusters in QDS are elastic! Our users regularly increase the size of the capacity of the clusters. This is a boon for capacity planners as they can be more reactive to workload patterns saving time and money.
Zero impact node rotations: By carefully orchestrating data compaction and HDFS block transfers prior to reassigning region servers, QDS minimizes the impact of adding/deleting/replacing nodes in a HBase cluster.
High-Availability Configurations: Putting together a high availability HBase cluster in the cloud can be daunting. QDS provides prebuilt templates for deploying HA HBase clusters through a single click.
The value proposition for this is very similar to Azure SQL Database: eliminate some of the administrative tasks by accepting their defaults. Doing this does remove some of the complexity of HBase.