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Microsoft's First Azure Hosted Service Is Powered By Linux
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."
The headline should read... The first Microsoft Azure hosted service to run Linux
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?
Misleading headline. They offer Windows or Linux. Ubuntu is what they chose for their Linux instances.
"...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.
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$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I sell open source software and I'm starting to see Ubuntu more frequently as a platform.
But I do wonder how much money Ubuntu makes from the coud services?
It has been embraced. So you know what comes next.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
>"Ubuntu is now the leading cloud and scale-out Linux-based operating system"
More than CentOS/RHEL? I would want to see real numbers to back up that claim or at least a clarification of their definitions.
Who is writing these? Azure has run Windows since its inception. This isn't a new thing.
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
20 comments in and no mention of hell freezing over? We've come a long way folks, we've come a long way.
Horrible fscking grammar is what it is...
Does this mean that Ubuntu is a guest OS on a cloud powered by Windows?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
It should be noted that there are things for which Linux is simply better suited for whatever reason, and in that case Microsoft does not shy away from that, either. In particular, have a look at Microsoft job postings for PyCon. These are all for backend development, where backend is Linux/Docker, for the simple reason that 1) there's no Windows equivalent to lightweight containers, and 2) IPython users generally expect a Unix-like environment with shell etc.
(Full disclosure: I am a Microsoft employee on the same team that posted these job openings.)
I(OMG Micro$haft using Linux, tee hee Windoze sucks..whoohoo it's 1998!).
Pssst...AC, you like investing? Have I got some stock suggestions for you!!!
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*
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.
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?
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.
Hotmail used to run on Solaris.
(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."
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.
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."
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.)
What about <, do you know why that doesn't work in Powershell?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
oh yeah, that's a good workaround.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
Vote for it here.