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Microsoft Offers Linux Certification. Yes, Really. (dice.com)

Posted by timothy on from the first-comes-the-embrace dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes: Former CEO Steve Ballmer once publicly referred to Linux as a 'cancer.' Not content to just let Ballmer blow up about it, company also spent a good deal of money and legal effort on claiming that open-source software violated its patents. A decade ago, the idea of Microsoft creating a Linux certification would have seemed like lunacy. But now that very thing has come to pass, (Dice link) with the Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate (MCSA) Linux on Azure certification, designed in conjunction with the Linux Foundation. Earning the Linux on Azure certification requires tech pros to pass Microsoft Exam 70-533 (Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions) as well as the Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator (LFCS) exam, which collectively require knowledge of Linux and Azure implementation. Microsoft evidently recognizes that open-source technology increasingly powers the cloud and mobile, and that it needs to play nice with the open-source community if it wants to survive and evolve.

6 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. Year of the Linux desktop! by Spy+Handler · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I can imagine the day when Windows is built on top of Linux, similar to how MacOS is built on top of BSD. That will be the year of the Linux desktop!

    Maybe in 2020, Windows version 12.

  2. Maybe they will spin off the Windows division by MobyDisk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Maybe Microsoft will one day spin-off the Windows division, so it becomes just another operating system that their cloud service supports. If they start writing their services to use .NET, then they could use Roslyn and .NET Core to make all their services portable. One could run IIS or Exchange on Linux. If it meant more sales for Azure, they could profit from it.

  3. Re:Too little, too late by FictionPimp · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I used to be 100% linux. I was the lead engineer for an environment that had 300 linux vms, oversaw the move from Debian to RHEL, and generally just couldn't imagine using windows.

    Now I manage a windows environment. It's all 2012R2 and with server manager, core/minimal, DSC, and powershell. I honestly really enjoy it and find it to be a perfectly fine solution. I'm as happy now as I was and I run a surface 3 pro with a dock and dual displays and manage about 200 windows vms.

  4. Re:Too little, too late by PCM2 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Now I manage a windows environment. It's all 2012R2 and with server manager, core/minimal, DSC, and powershell. I honestly really enjoy it and find it to be a perfectly fine solution.

    Seriously. If half the whiners would just learn Powershell and try managing some actual, modern Windows servers, I'm sure they'd go, "Huh! Whaddaya know." In some sense, modern Windows Server is kind of like C#, in that Microsoft learned from the competition, took its ideas, polished them up, and put its own spin on them. Nothing really wrong with that, if your chief concern is getting work done and not just arguing on the interwebs.

    --
    Breakfast served all day!
  5. Re:Not your father's Microsoft by Adriax · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Yeah, and that may be the forgotten lesson the new CEO is embracing. Even if you have really good, if not the best, of something in a sea of competition, if you try to force a monoculture you are going to drive people away.

    Windows didn't require a microsoft brand mouse in order to function and they still made a hefty profit on both hardware and software.
    But the times they did require a monocultire, like C#/.NET for most of its life, they found a lot of people just walked away and stuck to arguably inferior products.

    Just look at hololens, their big ball of holyshitthisisawesome. They have competition in the hardware department already, but they're helping asus instead of trying to block them. Now there's going to be two AR headsets running windows 10 instead of an all microsoft one and a competitor that would probably run a custom linux.

    --
    I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
  6. Not a good day to Zune by dbIII · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Most days yes, but on that one day a year on a leap year it's the classic example of an utterly stupid newbie mistake that would have failed a high school programming assignment in 1985.
    Files with an expiry date beyond which the music would not play meant it needed to know the date so a calendar was thrown in as an afterthought without even the most simple tests being applied - so on the last day of leap year the Zune would not work at all. A failure so epic that it is one for the textbooks and will be remembered long after anything else about the Zune.