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