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Microsoft's First Azure Hosted Service Is Powered By Linux

Posted by timothy on from the linux-is-pretty-good-as-a-server dept.

jones_supa (887896) writes "Canonical, through John Zannos, VP Cloud Alliances, has proudly announced that the first ever Microsoft Azure hosted service will be powered by Ubuntu Linux. This piece of news comes from the Strata + Hadoop World Conference, which takes place this week in California. The fact of the matter is that the news came from Microsoft who announced the preview of Azure HDInsight (an Apache Hadoop-based hosted service) on Ubuntu clusters yesterday at the said event. This is definitely great news for Canonical, as their operating system is getting recognized for being extremely reliable when handling Big Data. Ubuntu is now the leading cloud and scale-out Linux-based operating system."

66 comments

  1. Wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

    Not even Microsoft trusts Microsoft.

    1. Re:Wow by omnichad · · Score: 5, Informative

      Misleading headline. They offer Windows or Linux. Ubuntu is what they chose for their Linux instances.

    2. Re:Wow by Trepidity · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yeah, this seems to be more about Canonical positioning themselves as a serious enterprise-Linux competitor against Red Hat. "Ubuntu is now the leading cloud and scale-out Linux-based operating system" sounds like a marketing blurb aimed at RHEL.

      --
      10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
    3. Re:Wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I sell open source software and I'm starting to see Ubuntu more frequently as a platform.

      But I do wonder how much money Ubuntu makes from the coud services?

    4. Re:Wow by Nutria · · Score: 1

      Horrible fscking grammar is what it is...

      Does this mean that Ubuntu is a guest OS on a cloud powered by Windows?

      --
      "I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
    5. Re:Wow by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It should be noted that there are things for which Linux is simply better suited for whatever reason, and in that case Microsoft does not shy away from that, either. In particular, have a look at Microsoft job postings for PyCon. These are all for backend development, where backend is Linux/Docker, for the simple reason that 1) there's no Windows equivalent to lightweight containers, and 2) IPython users generally expect a Unix-like environment with shell etc.

      (Full disclosure: I am a Microsoft employee on the same team that posted these job openings.)

    6. Re:Wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So they of windows based windows or linux based windows a.k.a. Ubuntu.

    7. Re:Wow by phantomfive · · Score: 2

      (Full disclosure: I am a Microsoft employee on the same team that posted these job openings.)

      BASH installed on Windows by default, plz

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    8. Re:Wow by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 3, Interesting

      If I were in charge of that, you'd have it like yesterday :)

      On a more serious note, at this point I wouldn't put it into the "never gonna happen" bucket anymore, just based on all the things I've seen the company do in the past year that were in that bucket two years before. But either way, it will take a long time - bash (and any Unix shell, really) really expects a lot of Unixisms from the environment that it runs it. Basically, I don't think you can get a proper *sh without having a proper POSIX layer underneath. And all we have today is Cygwin, which is basically a giant hack.

      On the other hand, command prompt is getting some long needed love in Win10, and hopefully beyond. And when they asked about what people want from that effort, the requests for things Unix ranked pretty high on the list. These guys have said that they'll pay close attention to feedback, so I hope they'll deliver on that promise.

    9. Re:Wow by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      And all we have today is Cygwin, which is basically a giant hack.

      Close enough, man.

      On the other hand, command prompt is getting some long needed love [windows.com] in Win10,

      That's great. I wondered why the cmd prompt UI is so bad.....from that article it looks like the hackiness around it goes deep. Maybe that's why powershell doesn't have < ?

      btw do you know a good tutorial for getting a console application to generate powershell objects?

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    10. Re:Wow by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 1

      I don't think you can have an arbitrary console app generate streams of objects. You basically have to write a cmdlet for that, there isn't really any on-the-wire protocol for stdout that you could just generate and have it magically parsed into objects.

      (I actually dislike PS for that reason - the idea of structured data on the wire is great and a big improvement over plain text streams, but I think it would be better served by something like JSON over regular stdin/out/err. I think someone actually started working on an experimental Unix shell that does that, but I can't find it now or even remember the name.)

    11. Re:Wow by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      What about <, do you know why that doesn't work in Powershell?

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    12. Re:Wow by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 1

      I have no idea. Perhaps they might have felt it to be redundant with the ability to do cat foo | ..., but it sounds like a weak argument for not providing the conventional sugar for the same, especially given that they did it in many other cases.

    13. Re:Wow by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      oh yeah, that's a good workaround.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    14. Re:Wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Its because "pipe" is NOT a stream of data... It is a binary stream...

      It has to be interpreted first - translated into a stream of data.

      Thus PS cannot handle something simple like redirection.

    15. Re:Wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And SSH too please. Come on, this is 1990 any more!

    16. Re:Wow by sillybilly · · Score: -1

      Microsoft is fucking up. I thought Linux or the GPL was their antichrist. Their job is to maintain and sustain their own genetic variability in the computing genepool, without going extinct or exterminating others completely. Microsoft is fucking up on both fronts. All they have to do to compete with Linux (that used to run google.com) or BSD (that used to run yahoo.com) is to drop that fucking stupid ass client access license from Windows Server. People hate and despise getting screwed like that. Client access license? Are you kidding me? Sell me a server that takes up to 10 connections, up to 100, up to 1000, or up to 10,000, or up to 100,000, or up to 1,000,000 concurrently, and don't fucking make me hoard a pile or these certificates per seat with the woven thread and funky official holier than thou humbug about them. All people wanna do with those CAL certificates is wipe their shitty asses. That's Microsoft's only problem on the server front. Their job is not to accept Linux, because now they can no longer attack it like they used to, once they give it their blessing, but to push their own shit, and push it in balance and harmony with the rest of the ecosystem.
      Your job is
      1. to survive, or go down fighting for something that you care about to survive
      2. to not exterminate other varieties in your vehement competition against them
      Microsoft has and still is fucking up royally on both fronts. We don't want them running Linux. We don't want them to give their blessing to Linux. And especially we don't want no fucking cloud with blackmailed monthly access fees to our data held hostage. What we want is something better than a "Vista sucks" on the desktop, a better and improved Win2K or XP, leaner and meaner, with less garbage and snooping piled on into it.

      Intellectual property rights were erected during the founding father's days out of nothing, to create a better world, to create and enhance creativity, but intellectual property, unlike, say, land or chattel property, was always meant to be temporary, and ultimately enter the public domain, where all human knowledge and information ultimately belongs, including all GPL stuff after copyright expiration should enter public domain. Initially the terms were 14 years renewable to 28. These days we have temporary intellectual property, but it just got extended to 90 years from 70 around 1999. Why stop there? Why not have a 547 year and 6 month term? What's fair? Just how much more extra incentive did Walt Disney have to create Mickey Mouse if he knew that in 1999 the terms on his property were gonna be 90 years not 70?

      Intellectual property was not erected to create a world of extorting or hogging property then blackmailing everybody for access to it. Such as music artists that get paid 3 cents out of a dollar for a song, the rest goes to the labels or publishers that extorted a signature to sign the property rights over. Yes, marketing, distribution, being a merchant is hard work that does deserve a fair cut. But fair is all a matter of price. Yes, sometimes people throw stuff away for peanuts because that's their perceived value, and then whoever buys it and resells it, to someone who values that item much more, yes, there is this winning, or lottery effect, or money for free effect in the world, because perceived values are allowed to fluctuate widely. But there are situations like music artists, who would like a bigger cut of the price, but they are strongarmed into deals, and there are consumers who want a lower price on the music, and both these tendencies tend to cut into the profit of the middle man, the publisher, or intellectual property right hogger. Just cuz the rules on intellectual property have artifacts that can be technically abused, you should not forget about the good will or good intentions of why they were erected in the first place: to spur creation of new material. How is the richest guy on the planet fit in with this picture? Obviously he carries a lot of bad will, just like Carnegie and Rockefeller did, but not because peo

    17. Re:Wow by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 1

      Vote for it here.

  2. Misleading Headline by Joshua.Niland · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The headline should read... The first Microsoft Azure hosted service to run Linux

    1. Re:Misleading Headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Haha, holy crap, how could they get it this wrong? For posterity the original headline reads "Microsoft's First Azure Hosted Service Is Powered By Linux".

    2. Re:Misleading Headline by neo00 · · Score: 2

      Right. Or something like: "The first Azure-hosted service to run Linux is powered by Ubuntu".. etc.

    3. Re:Misleading Headline by im_thatoneguy · · Score: 1

      Actually it sounds like the Headline should read:

      "Microsoft's First Azure Service powered by Linux and Windows"

      From Microsoft:

      Select Linux or Windows clusters when deploying Big Data workloads into Microsoft Azure. With Windows, leverage existing Windows based code, including .NET, to scale over all of your data in Azure. With Linux, customers can more easily move existing Hadoop workloads into the cloud and incorporate additional Big Data components which can run in the service. By offering choice for Windows and Linux clusters, Microsoft is enhancing flexibility for customers to create insight from the massive amounts of data being created in the cloud with the OS of their choice.

    4. Re:Misleading Headline by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 1

      I thought this was old news. i.e.

      Microsoft is offering a Ubuntu 14.04 in a VM to run Minecraft

  3. Fight of the year: SystemD vs Microsoft by OzPeter · · Score: 4, Funny

    Roll up, roll up,
    See the former champion fight the young contender!
    Who will consume who?
    Will Microsoft wipe out SystemD?
    Or will "the Borg" finally meet its match?

    --
    I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
    1. Re:Fight of the year: SystemD vs Microsoft by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      WTF, my start button is running as PID 1!

    2. Re:Fight of the year: SystemD vs Microsoft by WarJolt · · Score: 1

      Just ctrl-alt-del and end task. That should help.

    3. Re:Fight of the year: SystemD vs Microsoft by postbigbang · · Score: 1

      Embrace, extend.....

      --
      ---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
    4. Re:Fight of the year: SystemD vs Microsoft by nightsky30 · · Score: 1

      Metro wants the D!

    5. Re: Fight of the year: SystemD vs Microsoft by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually if you see the release info for the newest systemd you'll see that lennart made it so that if you press control-alt-delete 7 or more times within 2 seconds you can force a restart of your computer or something like that. Systemd is getting way out of hand and there is no rhyme or reason to any of it.

  4. Worst product name this year by Fortran+IV · · Score: 3, Funny

    "...the preview of Azure HDInsight (an Apache Hadoop-based hosted service)..."

    Anybody wanna take odds on whether this gets nicknamed "Hindsight"?

    --
    I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
    1. Re:Worst product name this year by sumdumass · · Score: 1

      I certainly would not give odds on it. Hindsight was how i read it the first several times before realizing there wasn't enough letters. I bet it was similar for you too.

      That being said, i hope canonical doesn't follow suit with a couple other distros and change their focus to predominately their corporate offerings. Mandriva did that and now i cannot remember the names of the forks and don't have time to test them anyways. RedHat started down that path but seems to have put the brakes on before it caused too much damage. Maybe i'm too sensitive on the subject.

    2. Re:Worst product name this year by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I bet you a million Fedcoins it does. :)

      "Microsoft Hindsight...." Yep, sounds about right to me.

    3. Re:Worst product name this year by present_arms · · Score: 2

      http://pclinuxos.com/ Pclinuxos is the distro you are looking for, no systemd and the head honcho is Texstar, the dude who did the extra repo with the cool stuff for Mandrake back in the day (as it was).

      --
      http://chimpbox.us
    4. Re:Worst product name this year by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I just hope that Canonical gains enough clout to undo RedHat's push to get that systemd monstrosity into everything. I'll gladly accept Upstart, Wayland, and Unity; just so long as systemd disappears!

    5. Re:Worst product name this year by Richard_at_work · · Score: 1

      Why is it the worst possible name? Its supposed to give you a brand new view into your data - so in essence it is giving you the benefit of hindsight.

  5. You will dine in the shadows of Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You may control the desktop, Microsoft, but we control the Clouds

  6. Ubuntu is going to die. by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 1, Interesting

    It has been embraced. So you know what comes next.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  7. Leading? by markdavis · · Score: 5, Interesting

    >"Ubuntu is now the leading cloud and scale-out Linux-based operating system"

    More than CentOS/RHEL? I would want to see real numbers to back up that claim or at least a clarification of their definitions.

    1. Re:Leading? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      +1

      Amazon's Linux probably has Ubuntu beat ... forever?

    2. Re:Leading? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It is from MS... so MS won't/doesn't support RHEL/CentOS, so of course it would be "leading cloud and scale-out Linux based operating system" ON AZURE.

      So it is NOT the "leading cloud and scale-out Linux based operating system" when you include everybody else.

      ALWAYS take MS announcements as if they only have one company in business.

  8. So wrong by ZeroSerenity · · Score: 1

    Who is writing these? Azure has run Windows since its inception. This isn't a new thing.

    --
    For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
    1. Re:So wrong by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 3, Informative

      Did you mean to write, "Azure has run Linux"?

      That isn't quite true either. Azure ran Linux since it had VM IaaS, but it didn't have that "since inception", it appeared a little bit later.

      Either way, this news is something different. Previously, if you wanted to run Linux on Azure, you had to run it in a VM, and Microsoft only managed the VM host. Here, this is a hosted service that runs on Linux, where Microsoft is actually managing those Linux VMs for you.

  9. Why would anyone use Azure? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'm genuinely curious.

    1. Re: Why would anyone use Azure? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because "teh clowdz."
      Also, has anyone DoS'd MS and gotten anything besides a hearty chuckle in response? (Not talkin bout xbox)

  10. Amazing by homm2 · · Score: 2

    20 comments in and no mention of hell freezing over? We've come a long way folks, we've come a long way.

    1. Re:Amazing by Neil+Boekend · · Score: 1

      Hell isn't all that far from Detroit and I have been hearing they have quite a problem with, like, 2 meters of snow this year.
      So yeah. Hell froze over.

      --
      Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
  11. Ineptitude. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

    I sometimes wonder whether they are incompetent when they write these headlines, or if it's intentional to draw neckbeard views (OMG Micro$haft using Linux, tee hee Windoze sucks..whoohoo it's 1998!).

    Microsoft's first Azure hosted service is not and never was powered by Linux, headline is a flat out lie.

    Correct, non-lying scumbag neckbeard headline is: Microsoft's first Linux-hosted Azure service is powered by Ubuntu.

    1. Re:Ineptitude. by nightsky30 · · Score: 1

      I(OMG Micro$haft using Linux, tee hee Windoze sucks..whoohoo it's 1998!).

      Pssst...AC, you like investing? Have I got some stock suggestions for you!!!

  12. Azure? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    As a not-microsoft person, I didn't have a clue what the hell azure was / is supposed to be. I assume that's what they are calling their hosting service? If so, then obviously they'll want to offer a linux option if they are going to compete, since windows hosting is nowhere near as important.

  13. sometimes you can't eat your own dogfood by colinjl · · Score: 3, Interesting

    About 15 years ago, when a large Windows (NT) project was having trouble getting DNS to work properly at scale on NT, the SEs went to the source to ask how Microsoft themselves made it work. The sheepish answer was *cough*unix*cough*

    1. Re:sometimes you can't eat your own dogfood by Bogtha · · Score: 1

      Yep. At that time Microsoft were still running Hotmail on FreeBSD because they were struggling to migrate it to Windows.

      --
      Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
  14. I was looking for.. by s.petry · · Score: 2

    After reading the headline I was scanning for either the announcements of lawsuits or the mysterious death of Canonical executives. No juicy tidbits to investigate, just a broken summary.

    --

    -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

  15. Not understand Ubuntu fans by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'm having trouble understanding why anybody with even moderate experience would want to run Ubuntu.

    The process was: Install Ubuntu, Install KDE apps, do my work with KDE apps, under Gnome because Ubuntu's actually KDE desktop was only about 70% functional. And Kubuntu was only slightly better at say 80%.

    If I'm going to use KDE, I might as well use the whole thing, which I prefer to Gnome's lets hide functionality and remove functionality from the UI philosophy--and unity is worse; I'm going to use a system with good KDE integration.

    1. Re:Not understand Ubuntu fans by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You are describing the desktop version of Ubuntu. I can assure you that the server version of Ubuntu does not have much KDE or Gnome installed. I work for a very large internet company based in San Jose, CA, you have heard of us, and we have thousands of Ubuntu servers and I don't see much KDE or Gnome except for a couple of libraries.

    2. Re:Not understand Ubuntu fans by ledow · · Score: 2

      Oddly, if I want what *I* want on a machine nowadays, things have turned on their heads.

      On headless servers I run Ubuntu LTS - it means that when I want to suck in a new daemon, it's as simple as apt-get install, it installs all necessary dependencies (so though it might pick up KDE libs, it's unlikely to pick up X itself or anything else at all) and it all just works in a secure default config. And updates can happen automatically.

      On desktops, where I need to choose what happens to each pixel of my desktop in detail, I tend to run Slackware. It leaves me in control, lets me have any desktop I like and doesn't pretend to know better than I about how I should click things.

      The Linux world has been upturned for me over the last ten years. And with things like systemd dominance on the horizon, I can only see myself sticking with this setup. I don't particularly care how one of the remote headless servers I operate wants to show things, so long as it boots and I don't have to faff about worrying about the hardware. All I want is an initial SSH and be able to apt-get stuff and be up and running in minutes so I can put the rest of my config back on.

      And my desktop still needs to be like, well, my desktop. You don't get to play with it. And doing so is as rude as throwing all my stuff of my desk and putting your own on there.

  16. Ubuntu is not Linux? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    What's so special about Ubuntu that makes it "extremely reliable when handling Big Data" that is not present in other modern Linux distros? Or is Ubuntu not linux?

    1. Re:Ubuntu is not Linux? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Quality assurance.

    2. Re:Ubuntu is not Linux? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Generally by debian.

  17. Not the first time... by ayesnymous · · Score: 1

    Hotmail used to run on Solaris.

    1. Re:Not the first time... by spire3661 · · Score: 2

      Only becasue Hotmail was an acquisition and it took a bit of time and a few tries to get it to run on NT. They tried to switch over almost immediately after purchase.

      --
      Good-bye
    2. Re:Not the first time... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It took them several years... and embarrassed them quite a bit about how expensive it was to run.

      http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/11/21/ms_paper_touts_unix/

  18. MS will probably buy Ubuntu or partner w/them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    once they've done so, systemd is one domino they can kick over and the other distros fall down before them.

    you hate to discuss it, but really imo systemd will be the downfall of Linux, leading to a mass exodus into BSD and WINDOWS.

  19. Online File Backup by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Whenever on the move, have your data moved too. Archive Box is an online file backup solution with up to 100GB storage capacity. Never lose your file, photo or a video again. Try Archive Box. www.archive-box.com/features

  20. Zannos knows nothing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    He's a mouthpiece, only barely in control of his own gibbering idiocy spewing mouth, MS have been offering HDinsight for quite a while now, he's obviously just woken up after a long hit of the crack pipe.

  21. Don't forget MS's web rollout On BSDI by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Let's not all forget that MS's initial web servers (back when the internet was shiny and new) ran BSDI's offering.

  22. Testing UI by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    this is a test from gaby. i work on the front end ui for slashdot...will be testing more...