Microsoft To Run Linux On Azure

snydeq writes "After years of battling Linux as a competitive threat, Microsoft is now offering Linux-based operating systems on its Windows Azure cloud service. The Linux services will go live on Azure at 4 a.m. EDT on Thursday. At that time, the Azure portal will offer a number of Linux distributions, including Suse Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2, OpenSuse 12.01, CentOS 6.2 and Canonical Ubuntu 12.04. Azure users will be able to choose and deploy a Linux distribution from the Microsoft Windows Azure Image Gallery and be charged on an hourly pay-as-you-go basis."

Comments

Re:Heh...

[alexborges]

They called us commie scum. We will never forget.

Re:Heh...

[Nutria]

And a cancer.

I'm apparently out of date:

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

My understanding, back when MS first started talking about the whole 'Azure' thing, was that they were trying to distinguish themselves from Amazon(and others) 'just a bunch of VMs, but easy to buy/release programmatically' product in favor of some sort of more abstracted 'platform' that would hide both the hardware details and the OS guts, in favor of an environment that mostly resembled an application's-eye-view of Windows; but without the Windows administration, along with some similarly abstracted SQL and web-hosting things. It was always presumed that it wouldn't exactly be running on Linux; but that it didn't 'run Windows' in the sense of any 'Windows' SKU that Joe Customer could buy a box of and plunk onto a server at the office...

Was offering just-plain-boring offsite VMs always part of the plan? Did they discover somewhere partway through the execution phase that their pure-cloud application environment just wasn't quite Windows enough for their customers? Are the plain-VM offerings an integral part of the somewhat confusing alphabet soup of 'azure services', or is this a checkbox-filling thing that was tacked on because somebody wanted it and the internal cost of hyper-v licenses is small?

Re:I'm apparently out of date:

[shutdown -p now]

I don't know what the original plan was, but today Azure covers both ends of the spectrum. If you want, you can treat it as an abstract black box, deploying websites or services without caring what the underlying OS is and how it runs - all you know that it runs .NET and native Win32 binaries. Ditto for SQL Azure and other services.

On the other end, VMs have already been available for a while, and you could even upload your own VHDs there and mount them. I don't recall when that was added, but certainly not from the very beginning.

The original black box is not so black anymore, either. For example, you can use RDP to connect to your web and worker instances, to e.g. debug things there. In practice, it turns out that it was "Windows enough" all along, it just wasn't revealed entirely. On other fronts, it lets you e.g. configure PHP to run as an ISAPI module or via FastCGI, which exposes the fact that its IIS.

As to why, well... I guess some people want more control and VMs with RDP (and now Linux, too), while others are perfectly happy with not bothering at all and just clicking "Deploy" for their package in the admin interface. If you can convince both of those to give you money, why not? Especially if you're heavily competing against two other cloud service providers, one of which pretty much dominates the market.

The LOL of the day, actually, a ROTFL

[terjeber]

Ah, I haven't had a good ROTFL in a long time. Some time in the '90s I guess. Thanks.

Wait until ... Linux is eating into their desktop business...

Yes, and that will be two days after pigs grow wings and fly.

PS, I love Linux as a server, and it runs my Rails stuff very well, but "Linux on the Desktop"? Seriously? Does anyone believe in that anymore?

Microsoft makes big bucks from their server stuff. Really big money. Linux on the server is more of a threat to MS than is (an extremely theoretical) Linux on the desktop. Still they do it in Azure. Looks like you just proved that you are a clueless git (no, not the distributed kind that Torvalds did).

Charon

[Saija]

I heard this Charon guy it's having problems with the freeze of the styx river

Re:A good start

[shutdown -p now]

This started with early versions of Windows that required you to also buy DOS. A competitor to DOS came out (Dr. DOS), and Microsoft responded by putting a check into the Windows bootstrap that would cause it to exit out with an error if Dr. DOS was detected.

If you're telling old war stories, at least tell them right. This particular one is known as AARD code. It was present in a beta version of Windows 3.1. Digital Research found it a month before release, and so it was disabled there.

Re:Isn't it Reassuring to Know ...

[Samantha Wright]

To extinguish that joke before it goes any further, MS was one of the biggest single contributors to the Linux kernel for a little while because they were adding Hyper-V compatibility stuff. So they've been embracing and extending it for some time now.

Re:It's nothing personal, Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

You're either a fucking idiot or you're doing some sort of "I'm going to look like a moron in order to troll you" deal.

The article is about Microsoft offering to run Linux distros on Azure, not Microsoft stripping away all of their production servers and reinstalling their Azure stack on SLES servers with Xen. Microlith is absolutely correct when he says that while Microsoft will primary protect and care their own products, they might also support things you would not expect (Linux) when it is beneficial to them in a way (their cloud service being interesting for Linux users).

Re:A good start

[Anonymous Coward]

And always remember to include the memo from Microsoft Senior Vice President Brad Silverberg:

"What the [user] is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable, and when he has bugs, suspect that the problem is DR-DOS and then go out to buy MS-DOS."