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/
Where in San Francisco is this streaming live from - can you attend in person?
Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure
41–50 of 118 posts
Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
People don't bear Apple animosity for what they have done to RIM, or Google for what they have done to Nokia for the same reasons nobody hated Sun for what they did to DEC.
Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure
#43Pardon 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…
so it's like App Engine has a bigger brother :)
I hate Google App Engine, I hope Azure is better
Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure
#44Pardon 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…
I want to add that you can remotely debug your applications there using your desktop Visual Studio. I think this is an excellent addition.
Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure
#45Does anyone know when this is actually going to be available? (Its currently "coming soon") After Scott's talk today? Or are they going to slow ramp this?
Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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.
It didn't take long to figure out (Microsoft is one of the few companies that really puts a lot of effort into documentation, and I appreciate that).
I have two other problems with that:
- I need to think about it again whenever a (security) update is released for the software (not only including the jvm, but also the web server and, for me, scala and akka) - I have to upload that whole mess each and every time when I update my software. For my slowish internet connection, it took at least 30 mins to upload the whole stack (JRE, netty, scala, akka). [Fixed that by putting the .zips into the storage (whatever their S3 is called) and let the .cmd script download these]
Oh wait, I just remember one more detail about the webserver (taken from the .cmd):
:: 3) Place a Jetty 7.x distribution as jetty7.zip under approot in your project
:: 3.1) If you want to download the server into Azure directly from a URL instead, then
:: uncomment the next line and modify the URL as appropriate:
:: cscript /NoLogo "util\download.vbs" "http://download.eclipse.org/jetty/7.4.5.v20110725/dist/jetty... "jetty7.zip"
That is just wrong. If the eclipse server is down or changes its URL... my servers won't start. And, if I load balance my servers, I everytime use server resources of eclipse?
I really do not understand why Microsoft doesn't simply provide VM images with Java and the common webservers pre-installed. Or, at least a repository inside azure where I can download common Java versions and other common Java software. They spent big marketing dollar on their website and documentation on Java, yet when I actually used it, it felt like the engineer spent 2 hours on the Java support.
All of this is fine IF I want 100% configurable IaaS. But I'd rather have PaaS (which is what the parent comment was about), and Heroku, CloudBees etc. have so much more to offer, at least for Java.
Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure
#47Pardon 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 diff…
>> For a one-man project, nothing beats Google App Engine.
I'd argue that Heroku is even easier than App Engine.
Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure
#48In 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…
>> Nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft.
Somewhat off-topic, but I hate this quote. Replace Microsoft /w IBM/Oracle/etc and it's still a straw man argument.
I recently worked for someone who came on to replace the CTO of Java-shop, brought in a number of Microsoft developers, and was unceremoniously fired after less than 2 years.
Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure
#49Pardon 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).
Plus Google AppEngine (yes, Azure has more than 1 flavour: AWS style, GAE style, and the following that I'm about to mention) and also an environment where you can drop your pre-configured Windows 2008 Server VM as well (not sure if it is limited to Windows 2008 VM only).
Re: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure
#50Pardon 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?
Azure is a product from Microsoft which competes with AWS (IaaS/PaaS) from Amazon and App Engine (PaaS) from Google.