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Red Hat and Microsoft Partner On Azure (redhat.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Satya Nadella has made some interesting reforms to Microsoft. Today, Red Hat and Microsoft announced that they will partner to deliver Red Hat's product suite in Azure. Red Hat will also support .NET core in RHEL. Additionally, Red Hat's CloudForms product will now work with Hyper-V/Azure, RHEV, VMware, and AWS. Microsoft has certainly come a long way from the Halloween Memos. Here are Red Hat's blog post and Microsoft's blog post about the announcement
Hell just froze over.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
I'm not surprised. After all, the architecture and philosophy of Red Hat's systemd appears to be very much inspired by the architecture and philosophy of Windows. Systemd is all about one-thing-doing-everything-poorly, which has typically been the Windows approach, rather than the traditional UNIX approach of many-things-each-doing-one-thing-very-well. Systemd represents the Windowsification of Linux distributions, which have traditionally taken a much more UNIX-like approach. Bringing Windows and systemd/Linux together like this makes perfect sense, because they do complement one another due to their similarities.
Last I checked, Azure has Ubuntu Server. :)
Finding God in a Dog
Microsoft software DOES tend to be Swiss Army Knife. MS Word has THOUSANDS of menu and option items. I just right-clicked a random place on my screen and saw that Excel sorts on FONT COLOR.
Unix/Linux on the other hand, uses the "sort" program. It sorts. That's all. It doesn't do calculations, it doesn't know about fonts. It sorts, period.
Because "sort" only sorts, and "cut" only cuts, they are each good at what they do. Excel and other Microsoft software, on the other hand, has thousands of functions, they don't specialize in one thing. Much like a Swiss Army knife, which includes a dozen tools - tiny scissors, a two-inch saw, etc.
Neither is necessarily right or wrong, but of course a saw is better at sawing than a Swiss Army knife is, and a standard pair of scissors is better at scissoring than the tiny scissors included in a Swiss Army Knife. On the other hand, a Swiss Army knife is also very useful.
Systemd is a Swiss Army knife - it tries to pack everything and the kitchen sink into one multi-purpose thing. That's not inherently good or bad, it -is- Microsoft-like, not Unix-like.
At this point Lennart points out that systemd contains multiple binaries. Yeah, and a Swiss Army knife contains multiple blades.
(1) do everything poorly, but ship soon, and if you can't ship, bullshit and ship later
(2) get contracts with everyone, do whatever it takes but get the contracts, let some pirate your stuff if they want to just as long as they're running it so maybe they can buy something later
(3) stay in business. profit where you can, funnel the cash into places where you can't profit yet
whereas Apple is
(1) sell luxury products
(2) people who buy Apples do it to supplement their image, and defend the Apple brand in all forums in order to make themselves look good
(3) profit. lots and lots of profit.
and Linux is
(1) make cool stuff
(2) people use it and extend it. Developer users, professional and hobbyist, rave about how nice it is, because they feel a sense of shared ownership of the code
(3) The best extensions are added to the base, in small pieces that each do one thing really well
Cue the comments about angry people switching from RedHat to another Linux distro.
I switched years ago. I'm not angry, but redhat just fell behind in being good for what I wanted.
From what I remember, of digging through the init scripts, it's not surprising that systemd came out of Redhat. A good part of it is meant to speed up booting. Certainly back then, the people at RedHat coldn't write shell scripts for crap. The boot scripts were terrible convoluted messes. No wonder it booted slowly.
I actually cleaned up the X11 start script hugely, because one of the features I wanted was actually completely unreachable after they'd essentially rewritten it 3 times from 5 to 5.2 to 6, and then concatenated all 3 versions. I submitted a bug report and patch which went into a black hole.
I don't see any pressing reason to switch back to redhat any time soon.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
And after three decades of Microsoft earning zero trust I think I'll continue to take a pass. ...And remain skeptical.
I would add Red Hat has come a long way too. Away from the free software community on which they were built. Forcing systemd down our throats. They are no better than Micro$oft. There was a time when such a collaboration would have been unthinkable.
A single binary blob, accessible of course by APIs, mostly APIs written for desktop operating systems, for all of your system config needs!
Oh, come on, I am all for blowing the whistle and all, but do you really have to come out and reveal all their plans? You are not fun.
And you forgot one very important point: systemd-nsakey, for all your law enforcement needs!!
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
We're in the middle of the planning for the Windows 7 to 10 transition, and 2008 R2 to 2016, so we're getting plenty of face time with the premier support guys. The message is abundantly clear -- Microsoft is done selling one-off licensed software. Everything is going to be Azure based in their mind, and on-premises installations of software are the exception now. Server 2016 has so many Azure hooks that it might as well not have been released as a standalone product. Windows 10's updating model relegates stable releases to a much more minority position than they were in the past...it requires an Enterprise Agreement/Software Assurance to deploy Windows 10 LTSB and avoid constant cumulative upgrades.
In an environment like this, where they're moving back to mainframe style custodial IT service models, why wouldn't they partner with Red Hat or any other OS vendor for that matter? They want companies to move everything into Azure, not leave some bits hanging out on-premises or with another cloud provider. The Windows vs. Linux wars are cooling off because vendors sense the juicy returns in the cloud. Why sell software once when you can force businesses to pay over and over again for decades to use your resources/products? I've said before that both Amazon and Microsoft are building their clouds on the backs of Bubble 2.0, so funding is plentiful and therefore prices are incredibly cheap. The thing to watch will be when the bubble bursts, and a duopoly exists...will those low prices continue?
Microsoft should buy RedHat and provide offerings that make RHEL more compatible with a Microsoft server environment. Makes total business sense for both companies.
Otherwise, Amazon Web Services is going to eat their lunch (both Microsoft's and RedHat's)
Someone you trust is one of us.
then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
We won.
Best Slashdot Co
since before their IPO. This isn't that surprising at all other than that they survived this long and are now wanting to work together with said Evil.
Ok, I have to ask. While I understand why everyone is upset with systemd, why don't other similar programs get the same level of snub? OpenBox taking the place of a shell and a litany of GNU utilities is probably the most obvious example.
OpenBox, whatever it actually is, wasn't forced into Debian, Ubuntu, and pretty much every other major Linux distro completely against the will of the users of these distros. That's a big part of the reason why people don't dislike OpenBox. People don't get angry with something if it doesn't cause them any problems. But people do get royally pissed off when something totally unwanted is basically forced up their rectums. That's exactly what systemd was like to many Debian users: repeated, forced penetration of one's anus with an object that's large, sharp and rusty. It hurts a lot to have Debian systems that were first installed years ago, upgraded flawlessly many times over, only to have them ruined unnecessarily when systemd was forced upon Debian users. We told the Debian maintainers that we didn't want systemd. We saw the problems it had caused for so many others, and we didn't want to fall victim to it, either. We told them again and again and again that we wanted no part of systemd. We didn't want it on our systems. We didn't want it even considered for inclusion into Debian. Yet we were treated like dogshit. We were treated like scum. We had systemd forced onto our unwilling Debian installations. It's really disappointing when a distro like Debian, which was pretty much flawless for years on end, even when using its unstable version, suddenly becomes less reliable than Windows ME all thanks to systemd. It's like your internal organs are being torn out when your Debian installation may start to randomly fail to boot after doing what should be routine updates. It's a pain that nobody should ever feel.
That's a big part of the reason why people don't dislike OpenBox. People don't get angry with something if it doesn't cause them any problems. But people do get royally pissed off when something totally unwanted is basically forced up their rectums.
Yeah, that's exactly why I don't dislike Apple nearly as much as I dislike Microsoft, despite all these claims about how evil Apple is these days. Sure, Apple is evil, but I'm not being forced or pressured to use Apple products. I don't spend all my free cash on Apple crap, so it just doesn't affect me. Not so with Microsoft; it's pretty hard to have any kind of tech job without being required to use MS products.
The only time I've even used Apple products in recent memory is the last time I went to a Panera Bread and placed an order with one of their tablets. I'm fairly sure those were iPads.
Why do you still hold a grudge to them? The versions that you mention are ancient.
Apart from the colour of the aforementioned main, what's an Azure and why would I want one?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I didn't say having thousands or tens of thousands of features was a bad thing. In fact, I said it's NOT a bad thing. It's simply one of two ways to accomplish the same goal.
In the Microsoft approach, each program has thousands of features. There are maybe 6,000 features that Word, Excel, and Outlook all have, separately - they can all search, sort, etc. That's cool, it works for a lot people.
The other way is that you have a program which sorts (called sort), which searches (grep), etc. If you want to both search AND sort at the same time, you simply run both programs:
grep pattern source | sort
The cool thing about that is that you can search and sort with EVERY cli tool the same way, by simply piping it into grep or sort. Wget doesn't need to have search and sort built-in, you can just:
wget http://datafeed.com/ -O - | grep stuff
Separate, small tools is the Unix way. Both work fine ( for some definition of "fine"). Each approach has advantages and disadvantages. On Linux, I can type up a command to rename files with random numbers almost as fast as I decide I want them randomized. Creating the same program on Windows took a couple of days. On the other hand, the Windows program is -visual- you can -see- how to use it once someone programs it for you and you find and install it. The Linux command you have to figure out.
> Systemd is a wrapper
> All your little tools collected in one place
So it's a bunch of little tools wrapped together in a package, you say? That's nothing at all like a Swiss Army knife, then. A Swiss Army knife is completely different. A Swiss Army knife is a bunch of little tools wrapped together. As you said, systemd isn't that, systemd is a bunch of little tools wrapped together.
> But inherently it's a feature that Linux needs
It's quite a few features that Linux needs (98% of those being features Linux already had).
Try this some time. Delete everything on / except systemd. (Keep your kernel on /boot). You'll find you can still boot and get a shell (a systemd shell), on a system with nothing but systemd and a kernel installed. You know what you call a package of software that you can boot up and use, without depending on any other software to already be running? An _operating_system_. Look up any rigorous definition of an operating system and see if systemd+kernel isn't an operating system.
.NET as a default? Long term damage to Linux' reputation is where that'll go, due to the bad performance of most everything .NET regardless of platform. People will just say "it's slow" instead of understanding that "it's slow because it's using .NET". What a sorry direction to go.
I have something like the following inittab fragment that I built on my production servers:
ds:4:respawn:/home/prog/schedule.sh
da:4:respawn:/home/prog/alert.sh
cx:4:respawn:/home/prog/update.sh
cx:4:respawn:/home/prog/audit.sh...
These shell scripts mostly set a number of environment variables, then exec a runas.c program that I wrote that knocks the privilege down from root. After privilege is dropped, my runas program calls exec() on the *real* program that I want init to respawn.
This works, but it's a big pile of duct tape and bailing wire. I'm not proud of it.
I can get rid of all of that stuff with systemd, and launch it correctly:
$ cat /etc/systemd/system/broker.service
[Unit]
Description=broker
#After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target
[Service]
#ExecStartPre=
#ExecStopPost=
Environment=ORACLE_SID=mydb ORACLE_HOME=/home/oracle
ExecStart=/opt/pkg/broker
WorkingDirectory=/tmp
Type=simple
KillMode=process
Restart=always
User=nobody
#Group=nobody
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
I realize that people don't like the dbus integration, the replacement of su with systemctl shell, and many other complaints. However, this code has been carefully designed, it's reliable, and it gives me the ability to throw away a lot of my ugly glue. Call me heretic, but yes, I like it.
"After all, the architecture and philosophy of Red Hat's systemd appears to be very much inspired by the architecture and philosophy of Windows."
s/Windows/launchd and SMF/
FTFY. HTH.
Huh? WTF are you talking about? Where on Earth are you where you're having Apple shit forced on you? Are you in a parallel universe or something?
At ANY corporate or government job in the US, you are absolutely going to have MS shit forced on you. Everyone uses MS here. There is a very, very rare (usually small) company which uses Apples, but everyplace else you go, it's all MS. Even if a company uses a lot of Linux, they usually use MS for regular Office programs and Outlook email, and you end up using Linux on another PC or in a VM.
Am I the only one who instantly thought that RH has been sucked into the MS EEE vortex? I hope this isn't the Embrace step of the classic MS behavior. Actually, have there been ANY companies that have benefited long term from working with MS?
'All the same, let's be clear that all the "Microsoft Loves Linux" hype I saw at SUSECon yesterday and at other events earlier this year is just not true. Microsoft Azure loves Linux, there is no doubt; it is a basic requirement for them to become relevant on a cloud market dominated by AWS and Linux.' ref
Indifference is different from grudge. Parent says he couldn't be bothered to switch back. Could mean either grudge or he's simply happy with his marriage.
The big 5 are Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. All but MS are Apple shops for laptops (and all but MS and Apple are Linux shops otherwise). Amazon and I think Facebook allow MS, but support is second-class and MS is discouraged. Google and obvious Apple only allow MS for specific business needs (competitive analysis, cross-compat testing, etc).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You do realize that these "big 5" represent a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the total employment in the US (and world), don't you? And I'm pretty sure Intel is a bigger employer than several of these; it currently has 106,700 employees. It's a mostly MS shop. And IBM is still bigger than any of these, with 380,000 employees currently.
Now I'm curious, so I went ahead and looked these up. Facebook is a puny, puny little company, with only 10,082 employees. That's a tiny 1/10 of the size of Intel. Apple is a much more sizeable 115,000, so that probably is one the top tech employers. Google has just shy of 60,000 employees, so it's actually rather small. Amazon has 222,400 employees, so it's actually become quite a large employer very quickly, considering how long they've been around (since 1994, compared to Intel which has been around since the 70s, and IBM which has been around for over a century). Finally, Microsoft has 118,584 employees.
Cisco Systems is larger than FB and Google, at 70,112 employees. Oracle has 135,070 employees, making it larger than everyone on your list except Amazon. And of course there's Samsung, which has 489,000 employers, bigger than everyone else here.
Regardless, all of these put together are still a tiny, tiny portion of employers nationwide or worldwide. Most employers are MS shops to some degree (usually a very large degree). Why do you think MS is so profitable? It's because of their Windows/Office cash cow, but also because of all their enterprise products. Apple has NO enterprise products at all, they don't even have servers. They make all their money on individuals buying iDevices.
I speak only to my personal experience, not the rest of America.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
For the first 12 years, OpenOffice/Staroffice ran only on Microsoft operating systems. It's a DOS/Windows program designed with a Microsoft style mindset, ported to Linux more than a decade after it was released. It's not The Unix Way. It's good and useful, and it's 100% a Windows program ported to Linux.
As of four days ago, they went to /dev/null.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
I don't give a shit about your personal experience. My whole point is that, for most people who have any kind of corporate job involving sitting at a computer, that computer is going to be running Windows. If you've avoided that somehow, then good for you (or not, if you hate Macbooks and got stuck with those), but if you believe that your experience is commonplace, you're completely deluded. Your personal experience is irrelevant for the hundreds of millions of us out here who are stuck using Windows at work.
Do you know how many distros are out there to pick from? Many of them differ in interesting ways. Not to mention, there's Minix, BSD, Plan9, etc...
I'm old. I understand but you're missing the forest for the trees. We've more choices today then we ever had! In fact, we have so many choices now that I can just try to work with something new, all the time, and I do! More often than not, I'm not even booted into a real installed operating system - so to speak. Right now, I'm sending this to you from my hotel room, on a laptop, with Lubuntu installed, running Ubuntu in a Live USB state (I was helping someone but this is not uncommon), connected via VNC, to my home computer, using a virtual machine, with GhostBSD installed, to send you this message!
No choices??? No variety? You're out of your cotton-picking mind. No. You gave up learning and settled. We have choices.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Err... If you didn't care then why'd you ask 'em where they worked? Sheesh. ;-) They tell you and you tell 'em you don't care. Silly kids these days.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
A long time ago, in a computer shop, I bought a copy of RedHat. A few weeks later, I bought a copy of Slackware but I think it was off the 'net. I think it came with a book - but not RedHat. I think RedHat had a help file CD and maybe a booklet. Anyhow, I installed Slackware first and played with it for a while (I seem to recall we had to start xserver manually back then). Then I played with RedHat for about three days.
I haven't used it since. CentOS, yes. RedHat, no. It just didn't seem very good and that's always left a taste in my mouth, so to speak. I'm kind of surprised to see the comments here. I probably just haven't been keeping up. I figured that RedHat was still the darling of the enterprise and that everyone still loved them. They have done a great deal for the community, after all.
Ah well, imagine that?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Definitely the latter, or happy enough. I've got a couple of ubuntu machines and one Arch machine. Ubuntu has it's problems too, but it's still fairly easy to get to grips with and I'm used to administering it. There's also the handy PPAs for more timely updates of things. Arch is fun and always up to date, and easy to configure to do strange things.
RHEL has possibly even longer support (haven't checked), but I don't see myself needing anything even approaching 5 year's support at the moment. When it comes to Fedora, they seem on the leading edge of pushing things I'm not especially interested in, but are otherwise similarly up to date.
So why go over the energy barrier of switching?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
A long time ago, in a computer shop, I bought a copy of RedHat. A few weeks later, I bought a copy of Slackware but I think it was off the 'net. I think it came with a book - but not RedHat. I think RedHat had a help file CD and maybe a booklet. Anyhow, I installed Slackware first and played with it for a while (I seem to recall we had to start xserver manually back then). Then I played with RedHat for about three days.
I got RedHat 5.2 from a bookshop for about 30 quid (maybe more?) and it came with 3 books about it. I installed it and kept it for years, and it was the first version of Linux I ever ran (I knew I loved unix by that point, but I was a bi behind the curve on Linux it seems). It was awesome and it meant I could finally have unix at home. Naturally, I never looked back, though I kept a Win95 hard disk in the machine for games and used Linux to backup/restore it when it self destructed as was a regular feature of Win95.
I have very fond memories of that particular OS, the era it was from and the culture which surrounded it (the era). I mean, I remember purchasing a shiny new CD-RW drive which naturally didn't even slightly work. The instructions online all told you to compile a newer kernel (link to the HOWTO) and a bunch of utilities (mkisofs?). What I think I miss is not compiling kernels, but the mindset that compiling a kernel was not a particularly onerous to compile kernels and utilities and essentially build your own system. It was like everyone sharing DIY techniques, rather than who their favourite builder is.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I must confess... I sometimes still compile my own kernel just because I like watching the text scroll by. I'll download a make from source just to see it, if I'm bored or just wanting to watch it. I don't really know what it is but it's still magical. Of course, my terminal is a gray (almost black but not quite) background with green text.
I don't recall my version of RedHat coming with books? I think it had a CD with it but it may have actually been a floppy now that I think about it. I really don't recall. Wow... It was probably a floppy, now that I think about it. It was probably several of them. And it was, indeed, exciting. Of course, sometime around that time would have been when I thought I was getting a bargain and bought a CDRW for $1000 USD (around 700 quid I think?) and spent way too many hours getting it to work. As I recall, it was junk and a year later they were just a couple hundred dollars and they're pretty much free now.
The heady days of the revolution! I had to add memory chips, not really RAM - I guess, to a TRS-80 just to have lowercase letters. That would have been quite a while before this, of course, but that's why I have my almost black (not quite) and green text. Pfft... Amber was for the wealthy! I seem to recall seeing a monitor that did both.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Oh, you ranted about how you, personally, don't like MS because in your personal experience it was forced on you. Well, I have the same rant about Apple. Different people have different experiences and values, and what a boring world it would be if we were all the same.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Oh, your choices aren't upsetting anyone (I don't think). It's just that there's so many ways and so many variations that I'm not sure I can agree with you. Between hypervisors enabling running without actually touching the bare metal to the ability to run in kernel mode, there are countless things.
I don't know if you're a curmudgeon. I'd say you're probably jaded. Go try to install Plan9 in a VM. That'll bring back some magic. If you don't have VMWare then either pirate the hell out of it or use VirtualBox. (I think there are copies up on the torrent sites? I've not used them - I'm able to afford the stupidly expensive license. I've a stash of licenses for various versions over the years and buying a perpetual license is not possible.)
There's Minix. There's Hurd. There's even Debian/HURD. There's Android and iOS (for what they're worth). I hear good things about Windows 10, I don't actually have any experience with it but I did see it in the wild once. OS X is built off of some BSD variant I believe but different enough - I don't use it but I recommend it for those interested. There are so many flavors of Linux that it's obscene and actually confusing. My return to Linux-only was fraught with peril. Err... Or something like that.
What I really like is just having the ability to use a Live USB stick and going to a session in RAM. I never get bored. There's still so much that I don't know that I, literally, am set for the rest of my life when it comes to learning something new every single day. I'm retired and one of the things I insist on is learning new things - I want to keep my brain sharp because I'm not afraid of much but mental incapacitation scares the shit out of me. It scares me as much as maiming used to scare me. It scares me as much as being physically incapacitated while retaining full mental faculties. I'd rather eat a bullet than any of those.
So, I try to learn new stuff. All the time. Hell, I go to Stack Exchange and spend hours there reading and learning stuff. I help, when I can, though I just decided to start that recently. (Like a month ago. I'm already approaching 1000 points.)
Anyhow, I don't see what you're seeing. You can still program in BASIC. There are emulators for all that you want. There's freedom to keep that stuff going and advancing some of it as you go.
Then again, maybe I'm not your target audience or normal. I don't think any one OS is perfect and I'm kind of OS agnostic. I don't think *all* Apple users are fashionistas. Hell, I bought 62 iPads over the summer. (Long story, I've kind of, sort of, adopted my local elementary school - it's small with just 56 students and I've made friends with all the kids and the overworked IT staff of just one person.) Last time, I bought them Windows 7 laptops. I'm probably going to go with Macs and do a refresh this summer.
Well, I can say that I partially agree with what you're saying but I think that's you being your own worst enemy. The magic is still there. It's more diffused but it's there. It's hidden in far away bits of code but there for the taking. You just need to poke. A lot of us seemed to give up poking and started just being users. Maybe that's what happened to you? Buy yourself a RPi or similar. The magic is still there. It's just that the computer is akin to a toaster now. If you want to see the magic you need to take the toaster apart. If you want to learn everything, you need to do it while it's still plugged in. (Now that's taking an analogy too far but I guess it works.) Take the toaster apart and plug it in to 220. The magic is there.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You're right. I even think the number of Amazon employees includes the warehouse personnel, supply chain management staff, and some guys who convince (sales guys, actually) vendors to sell on Amazon. Some of these kinds of people may not be getting company laptops, and even if they do their primary work may not be "defined" by the OS on that laptop.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Warehouse personnel probably don't get issued computers at all; they probably have handheld devices, and probably use a few centralized computers, so they probably have to use Windows on those, but they probably don't spend that much time with them. The handheld devices are very likely to run WinCE, however, which is another kind of hell. Any kind of management staff or salespeople, however, would be using Windows all day on company-issued computers.