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Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure

windowsazure.com

31–40 of 118 posts

Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure

#31
post #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?

What facorreia said, and I'll add for simplicity that Azure is to Microsoft what AWS is to Amazon (as opposed to your question of Azure being like EC2).

Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure

#32
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'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 would add a third point to that: we've watched MS use their size and position to stifle and destroy good companies. Now, when MS does something that could cause them problems, we react with glee.

Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure

#33
post #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?

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 relati…

Well.... I wont pretend I understand all of it, but it seems their offering is pretty big.

So it doesn't have to do much with "Windows" OS in any sense, it's just a little confusing name for their SaaS.

Thanks!

Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure

#35

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 pr…

Actually, this is the approach you need to take to install any software onto an Azure VM that is not part of the Windows Server-based installation. But you really only need to figure out how to do it one time; after that, it should be part of the build process for your .cspkg and something you don't need to think about again.

One of the other announcements from yesterday is that there's now tooling for Eclipse which should eliminate this pain point. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh69094... for an overly-detailed description of deploying a Java app to Azure.

Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure

#36
post #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?

Yes, Windows Azure is very similar to Amazon Web Services, but with Microsoft's technology stack. You're supposed to use SQL Azure (the 'managed' version of SQL Server with some cool features like Federations and Data Sync) as your main database system, for example. There's Blob Storage which is like S3 and Table Storage which is more like Cassandra but you can ignore it (no indexes is a huge handicap). The main difference between EC2 and Azure Compute is that Microsoft auto-updates Windows and IIS on Azure whereas you have to do the updates yourself on EC2. Otherwise it's basically the same at the same price.

For a one-man project, nothing beats Google App Engine. Azure and AWS require more work.

Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure

#37

This 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.…

They made a new portal in HTML5 and JavaScript. When you access the former one (that was in Silverlight), there's a link at the bottom inviting you to change.

IE9 was optimized for rich HTML5 and JavaScript applications and IE10 on Windows 8 won't even run Silverlight.

Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure

#38
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 relati…

Well.... I wont pretend I understand all of it, but it seems their offering is pretty big. So it doesn't have to do much with "Windows" OS in any sense, it's just a little confusing name for their SaaS. Thanks!

Originally Windows was the only OS in this platform, but I iirc they are planning to change the name also.

Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure

#39

For those curious to learn more, today (June 7th) at 1PM PDT there will be a live streaming with Scott Guthrie from Microsoft. http://www.meetwindowsazure.com/

Is... Is that a picture of a Mac? (http://www.meetwindowsazure.com/img/home/hero.png)

Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure

#40

For those curious to learn more, today (June 7th) at 1PM PDT there will be a live streaming with Scott Guthrie from Microsoft. http://www.meetwindowsazure.com/

Is... Is that a picture of a Mac? ( http://www.meetwindowsazure.com/img/home/hero.png )

A lot of MSers use Apple hardware, I wouldn't be surprised.
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