OFF TOPIC: But I'm glad they've opened up their "eligible-country" list to include many more countries (including my own). Finally I can test-run Azure without having to use any dubious means like setting up a free US phone number to receive an SMS on.
Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure
21–30 of 118 posts
Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure
#22Why 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've thought a lot about this over the past few years. I believe there are a couple of cultural factors which contribute to it. On the large scale, Apple's "I'm a Mac. I'm a PC," made Microsoft bashing socially acceptable in the general culture. The second is more subtle, but more applicable to HN.
Microsoft is not a Silicon Valley company and it never was. One source of animosity that this has created is that it has been a powerful competitor to a great number of Silicon Valley startups. More deeply, as a bootstrapped company, it goes against the economic model upon which Silicon Valley's entire capital structure depends...YC cannot produce another Microsoft because YC companies take outside investment at day one. A startup which emulates Microsoft doesn't offer an opportunity to make early stage investors rich.
Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure
#23This is great, but you can't actually configure virtual machines unless you're one of the "select members of the community". So, if you sign up today, on the three month trial, you can't just configure a linux machine and test it.
If you even manage to get to the correct place, which is a Silverlight powered management console - when HTML5 / AJAX would do.
Lots of bloat and lots of cruft and no actual functionality.
http://i.imgur.com/2bNwU.png and http://i.imgur.com/2G8Pa.png
Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure
#24This will hopefully make it much easier to build sites that span multiple clouds or at least can failover to another cloud.
Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure
#25[deleted]
Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure
#26This is great, but you can't actually configure virtual machines unless you're one of the "select members of the community". So, if you sign up today, on the three month trial, you can't just configure a linux machine and test it. If you even manage to get to the correct place, which is a Silverlight powered management console - when HTML5 / AJAX would do. Lots of bloat and lots of cruft and no actual functionality.…
I see they use the minimalist Metro design even here. Judging the graphical design only, it looks pretty good.
Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure
#27Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure
#28Why 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.
Most of the hacker animosity stems from MS' history of using underhand tactics to destroy FOSS and the web. Not compete with, but destroy at all costs. The ill-will this engendered in the community will probably never go away, and rightly so. It arguably set our industry back decades.
Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure
#29Why 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've thought a lot about this over the past few years. I believe there are a couple of cultural factors which contribute to it. On the large scale, Apple's "I'm a Mac. I'm a PC," made Microsoft bashing socially acceptable in the general culture. The second is more subtle, but more applicable to HN. Microsoft is not a Silicon Valley company and it never was. One source of animosity that this has created is that it has…
I disagree with the 2nd paragraph. Amazon is not a SV company but the are loved by SV. I think the problem goes waayy back to the original ideological differences of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
However one thing that might make SV loyalists tick is that the largest software company in the world is not in SV.
Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure
#30Pardon 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?
Windows Azure is a collection of services managed by Microsoft that, together with software development tools and SDKs (for popular languages such as C#, Java, Ruby, Python, Node.js, or over plain REST), comprise a computing platform.
It includes services for on-demand computing, storage (in No-SQL form and Blob form), message queueing, service bus, secure connection, identity management, horizontably-scalable relational database, big data computing (Hadoop), media encoding and streaming, content distribution network, reporting, business intelligence, a data marketplace.
The list goes on and on and is increasing rapidly. The gist is, you consume those services, Microsoft hosts and manages them (with high availability, geographic redundancy, etc.) and you pay for what you use.