Microsoft “loves Linux” as it makes Azure bigger, better

[J65nko]

From
http://arstechnica.com/information-t...bigger-better/

In San Francisco today, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said something that was more than a little surprising: Microsoft loves Linux. The operating system once described as a "cancer" by Nadella's predecessor, Steve Ballmer, is now being embraced (if not extended) with open arms, at least when it comes to Redmond's Azure cloud platform. Nadella told us that some 20 percent of VMs on Azure use the open source operating system.

[thirdm]

"Azure offers a range of Linux distributions with enterprise support."

This sentence seems important to me. Well, not important to me personally: I could give a flying furball about "the cloud." But for the people wanting to use Azure and Linux, I guess they better like Red Hat, SuSE, or whatever this "range of Linux distributions" is comprised of. I wonder if the distros have to make a deal to get in there.

Also, call me cynical, but this seems more or less the modern equivalent of DEC Alpha support in WinNT. It's an indicator of their current position in the market. If they later corner the market, see how well their non-Windows cloud works.

[rocket357]

As an AWS employee, I'm not at all surprised that Azure offers Linux, just as AWS offers Windows cloud images =)

[IdOp]

I guess they'll be offering android phones soon, and after that they'll invent Linux.

[Carpetsmoker]

Originally Posted by IdOp

I guess they'll be offering android phones soon, and after that they'll invent Linux.

But when Microsoft invents Linux, It will be very different.

It'll have a very complicated service and logging system that few people really understand, and even fewer people really want. It will also feature a complex sound system with several subsystems that may stop working at any given moment. Features developed on other systems will either be re-implemented in a slightly different (incompatible) way, or simply ignored (unlike Linux, which adopted kqueue and strlcat).

[rocket357]

Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker

But when Microsoft invents Linux, It will be very different.

It'll have a very complicated service and logging system that few people really understand, and even fewer people really want. It will also feature a complex sound system with several subsystems that may stop working at any given moment.

I hope this was a nod to systemd and pulseaudio hahaha

[J65nko]

In the comments of this article somebody mentioned that a FreeBSD VM image is available on Azure, but I failed to find it

[sacerdos_daemonis]

Stealth image?

[Carpetsmoker]

Maybe it's listed under Linux?

[J65nko]

I found this to set it up FreeBSD on Azure :

• http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2014...ebsd-in-azure/
• http://msopentech.com/blog/2014/05/1...crosoft-azure/

[sacerdos_daemonis]

I could not help noticing that no mention of Linux was made beyond the first paragraph. A marketing ploy to attract the attention of Linux users'? But then, I quickly skimmed the article, since I have no interest in "the cloud."