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Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure

windowsazure.com

11–20 of 118 posts

Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure

#11
post #5

Why do I get the feeling that every article about MS is posted with the tone "Hey look guys, MS is doing something stoopid". The same tone seems to be missing when other tech companies are concerned.

This looks like a normal news submission to me. The comments aren't bad either, except for yours ;-)

Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure

#12
post #5

Why do I get the feeling that every article about MS is posted with the tone "Hey look guys, MS is doing something stoopid". The same tone seems to be missing when other tech companies are concerned.

I don't think that "stoopid" is the word. It's more like "strange". Also probably you want to read more about M$ history (and software history) to know why hackers really don't like M$ above all other companies.

Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure

#14

I was under the impression that Azure only offered a platform-as-a-service, not infrastructure. Is that no longer the case? You can now run your own VMs and put whatever you want on it?

Good point, when I was looking into Azure about 18 mths ago, you could have a Windows VM but the idea was that it was instantiated and port 80 was called and then it might get thrown away again afterwards. The same may be true for Linux instances, but its an important distinction between this service and AWS/Linode where you can have an instance running long term which has it's own state.

Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure

#15

I was under the impression that Azure only offered a platform-as-a-service, not infrastructure. Is that no longer the case? You can now run your own VMs and put whatever you want on it?

I'm really hoping they break out of that model. It's great if you want to run single apps on an instance but it falls down once you look at running a series of clients on the same instance. You need to do some hacking to get the IIS setup for many sites which is how we operate.

Our current proposed structure would be to use AWS for front end and Azure for the DB which isn't ideal but I find AWS far more flexible for our purposes.

Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure

#17
Pardon my ignorance, but I never understood what Azure actually is. All I hear is some buzzwords. And this makes it even more confusing.

Can some smart people of HackerNews explain that? Is Azure similar to Amazon EC2? Or is it just some lightweight Windows installation on Microsoft-hosted VPS?

Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure

#18
post #10

In other words, Microsoft is not willing to sacrifice the Azure platform by digging their heads in the sand and pretending they are a server monopoly. Not allowing Linux is a major disadvantage even to Windows shops (Stack Overflow runs Redis on a Linux box, for instance). I think this is fantastic news. AWS needs serious competition from industry titans. It doesn't matter if a startup charges half the price if it mi…

IMHO it shows me they're in it to win it and willing to bend to market forces and support what their customers want. To me that is the biggest message here.

I would say it is not about "bending" so much as just solving customers' (not consumers' ) problems. It is, in my opinion, a mistake to attribute Microsoft's motivations as being ideologically driven in the way that those of the FOSS movement may often be.

At their core, Microsoft tends to be very practical when it comes to B2B relationships.

Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure

#19

In other words, Microsoft is not willing to sacrifice the Azure platform by digging their heads in the sand and pretending they are a server monopoly. Not allowing Linux is a major disadvantage even to Windows shops (Stack Overflow runs Redis on a Linux box, for instance). I think this is fantastic news. AWS needs serious competition from industry titans. It doesn't matter if a startup charges half the price if it mi…

In small companies / startups I'm pretty sure people can and have been fired for buying Microsoft.

Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure

#20

I was under the impression that Azure only offered a platform-as-a-service, not infrastructure. Is that no longer the case? You can now run your own VMs and put whatever you want on it?

I tried running Java (well, actually Scala) on it. Java is officially supported... the support is: Pack your JVM into a .zip, a .cmd script will call a .vbs script to unpack your JVM and then start it.

I kept thinking that this must be a quick and dirty hack and there was a proper PaaS-like solution. Nope, that is the official support for the JVM. Pretty much the opposite of Heroku.

To be fair, they probably offer proper PaaS for their technologies. But for other things, it is basically (windows) infrastructure and you have to configure/update/etc your software on your own. I wouldn't expect any bells and whistles for the Linux support. Then again, it doesn't hurt if we have a choice.

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