Microsoft and Canonical Make Custom Linux Kernel (neowin.net)

Billly Gates writes: Microsoft and Canonical's relationship is getting closer besides Ubuntu for Windows. Azure will soon be offering more customized Ubuntu containers with a MS optimized kernel. Uname -r will show 4.11.0-1011-azure for Ubuntu cloud based 16.04 LTS. If you want the non MS kernel you can still use it on Azure by typing:
$ sudo apt install linux-virtual linux-cloud-tools-virtual
$ sudo apt purge linux*azure
$ sudo reboot
The article mentions several benefits over the generic Linux kernel for Azure

Comments

Does it provide necessary features?

[Anonymous Coward]

Such as native hooks for telemetry?

FTFY

[El Cubano]

If you want the non MS kernel you can still use it by not using Microsoft's cloud platform in the first place

There. FTFY.

Now, this is a serious question, but what reason could someone have for running Linux on Azure? Are there not any of a multitude of other better platforms out there for running Linux? I mean, I certainly understand if you are all in for Microsoft with things like Exchange, SQL server, AD, Sharepoint, etc., their cloud platform sort of make sense. But this, Ubuntu (or any other Linux) on Azure is something that simply does not make sense to me.

Re:FTFY

[swb]

I think Microsoft is giving away a certain amount of Azure to anybody who uses O365 in any significant way, and there's probably a lot of mixed infrastructure shops with both MS and Linux running. What better way to lure them in deeper?

At the end of the day, MS values them more as cloud resource consumers than software licensees.

It might even make sense for someone who can run a workload on any cloud stack to figure out how to arbitrage their workload where it's cheapest, gain cross-cloud redundancy, etc.

Re:FTFY

[Billly Gates]

If you want the non MS kernel you can still use it by not using Microsoft's cloud platform in the first place

There. FTFY.

Now, this is a serious question, but what reason could someone have for running Linux on Azure? Are there not any of a multitude of other better platforms out there for running Linux? I mean, I certainly understand if you are all in for Microsoft with things like Exchange, SQL server, AD, Sharepoint, etc., their cloud platform sort of make sense. But this, Ubuntu (or any other Linux) on Azure is something that simply does not make sense to me.

FYI I am the submitter

The answer is easy. Corporations who already use Azure with Azure Active Directory and Office 365. Visual Studio support and the customers' internal developers are used to the Azure API's and frameworks as they use it for their other Windows specific services. Might as well keep using the APIs and frameworks for their other platforms rather than learning Amazon and dealing with 2 clouds.

Microsoft also bundles Azure licensing too for enterprise customers so it maybe a little cheaper if you already have Azure credits to just fire up a Linux container if the boss for example wants to close one of the datacenters to cut electricity costs and move their Linux based servers. Amazon already contributes alot of Linux code to get it run on their E3 and E5 platforms I guess this is not surprising that MS is doing the same.

Microsoft's incentive to being friendly to OSS and Linux now is to make money this way. Microsoft makes money either way in this model whether you run Windows or not. I have not written any software on Azure but it supports FreeBSD as well and RedHat. Maybe the Redhat image already has an MS optimized kernel that I am not aware of? Visual Studio does have IOT Python support for Azure so it looks like they really are not doing win32 lockin at all with Azure but I could be wrong. Anyone knowledge care to comment and how it compares to Amazon's cloud services?

I figured this story would make slashdotters uncomfortable, but I kind of like this arrangement.

  If you do not want to use their products don't. MS doesn't have to Extend, Expand, and Extinguish standards or lock things down to win32 which we all hate! Rather they make the APIs available to all platforms and several languages to their cloud offerings so you an keep using Linux or use Amazon if you want. However, the downside is the cloud framework hooks lock you into Azure. Amazon though sadly is doing the same. So the OS now is Azure and Windows is just one of the shells on top. Linux is another.

Re:FTFY

[0100010001010011]

Microsoft the Gold Standard. I've worked two places that are looking at Azure and it's made using Linux actually easier.

"Hey boss, I need some cheap servers to test something out, I can do it with Microsoft". We get billed. I get to use Linux. The company gets "Microsoft".

Re:Obligatory

[Z80a]

2.5. Fill with ads

Re:Canonical have a custom Ubuntu kernel for AWS t

[Bert64]

There aren't really any changes so much as reconfiguration...
A generic kernel needs a complete set of drivers for all the hardware it *might* be installed on, whereas a cloud hypervisor is a fixed target. You can safely remove support for physical devices, and for older processors than those used by the cloud host which results in a smaller better optimized kernel. I've done exactly the same thing, albeit on a smaller scale, as i have 100+ vm images running on the same hypervisor and underlying physical machines.