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