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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."

21 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. So what's new? by recoiledsnake · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Microsoft almost always supports other platforms if it has enough marketshare and if they think they can make money off it. They even seem to be making Office for the iPad. The summary is trying to be a troll as usual. This is like WINE, more support is always good if you trying to get as many customers as possible.

    They even released an Android app recently.

    http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsofts-bing-mobile-team-introduces-new-app-first-for-android-phones/12856

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    1. Re:So what's new? by chrb · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Microsoft almost always supports other platforms if it has enough marketshare and if they think they can make money off it.

      Microsoft will not support other platforms if they pose a real threat to their core product of Windows+Office, but they will support other platforms if it helps to maintain the appearance of competition and hence keep antitrust regulators at bay. Having an Apple desktop taking 5% of the global market is acceptable if it means that Microsoft gets the other 95%, and when accused of having a monopoly, they can point to Apple as evidence of a competitive alternative. A duopoly with a single-digit market share competitor is better than being subject to antitrust regulators.

    2. Re:So what's new? by chrb · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Microsoft currently doesn't make money on anything but Windows and Office -- everything else is either runs at loss, or has so much money sunk in it while it was being developed or ran at loss, it will take significant amount of time to turn profit.

      Citation? Exchange - for example - would appear to be a very profitable product, XBox has been hugely profitable for the last 5 years

      MSFT operating profit by division. Xbox comes under "Entertainment and Devices", a division that has historically been a loss leader. The vast bulk of the profit is from Windows + Office + Windows Server. Basically Microsoft's profits as a whole are largely dependent on sales of Windows and Office: profits jump 31% on strong Office sales, profits stagnate as Windows sales fall.

  2. Re:Heh... by alexborges · · Score: 4, Informative

    They called us commie scum. We will never forget.

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  3. Re:Heh... by Nutria · · Score: 4, Informative

    And a cancer.

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  4. I'm apparently out of date: by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?

    1. Re:I'm apparently out of date: by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

  5. The LOL of the day, actually, a ROTFL by terjeber · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).

  6. This affects my vacation plans by claytongulick · · Score: 4, Funny

    I was planning to book a skiing vacation in Colorado, but it looks at if all the sweet powder will be on the mountains in hell.

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  7. Charon by Saija · · Score: 3, Informative

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

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  8. Re:A good start by uigrad_2000 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I agree that this is a positive step.

    I have nearly a religious hatred towards MS, and it has nothing to do with "Microsoft's desire for profit." I work for a company that sells software for profit, so obviously that would would be hypocritical if I felt that way.

    What I've always hated about Microsoft was their willingness to buck standards just to prevent their users from using other products along with MS products.

    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. Any time a company goes out of their way to make their own product not operate with 3rd party software, it generates serious rage from customers like me.

    As I look back over the last few years, the last move by MS that really angered me was the whole OOXML vs Open Document war, where Microsoft refused to use the new standard, and instead made their own new standard with built in obfuscation.

    There's still a lot terrible decisions that MS makes for their customers (hiding file extensions by default in Windows, modifying extensions on files downloaded with IE without informing the user, automatically removing line breaks on messages read in Outlook without telling the user), but I've seen far less pure evil come from the giant, compared to ages past.

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  9. Are you sure? by symbolset · · Score: 4, Funny

    With so many different Linux distributions, how are you so sure one isn't named Azure?

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  10. Isn't it Reassuring to Know ... by srobert · · Score: 4, Funny

    ... that Microsoft is now embracing Linux and will be extending its capabilities?

    1. Re:Isn't it Reassuring to Know ... by Samantha+Wright · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

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  11. Re:A good start by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  12. Re:Heh... by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 3, Funny

    And a cancer

    And throw in a chair

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  13. Re:It's nothing personal, Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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).

  14. Re:A good start by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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."

  15. Re:Heh... by __aaltlg1547 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yeah, but why would you want to run Linux through a Microsoft cloud server? That's the big mystery.

  16. Re:It's nothing personal, Linux by catmistake · · Score: 5, Funny

    They have excluded their own proprietary enterprise solutions in favor of Linux.

    Citation please.

    it was a little tough to find this, but here ya go:
    Microsoft To Run Linux On Azure

  17. Re:Kilkenny Cats by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Oh my God! They Kilkenny!

    You bastards!