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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.
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*
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.