Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/linux/

by gouranga • 14 years ago

173 113 14 years ago

windowsazure.com

barryhunter• 14 years ago

Even more telling, is Google Chrome is used as the browser in the demo video.

cbg0• 14 years ago

Well, you can't run IE on Ubuntu.

nnnnni• 14 years ago

ies4linux: http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page

mtgx• 14 years ago

That's interesting. Since IE is not supported on Linux, that means Microsoft will have to support Chrome and perhaps Firefox on the Linux machines, and their engineers will have to use Chrome (if they are not using it already).

rkwz• 14 years ago

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.

aerique• 14 years ago

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

m0skit0• 14 years ago

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.

brudgers5• 14 years ago

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.

rbn• 14 years ago

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.

AutoCorrect• 14 years ago

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.

mcantelon2• 14 years ago

Microsoft also doesn't do much that is interesting. They tend to imitate and their imitations are seldom better, and are often worse, than the originals. The only moderately recent exception I can think of offhand is Kinect. Are there other innovations they've brought to market over recent years? Microsoft's research division does amazing things, of course, but I'm talking about products.

JonnieCache• 14 years ago

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Documents

leeohsheeus2• 14 years ago

The Microsoft of 1998 is not the Microsoft of 2012. Today's MS releases a tremendous amount of code under open source licenses - most recently, their entire web development stack (ASP.NET MVC, etc):

http://aspnet.codeplex.com/

gouranga2• 14 years ago

I posted this article on HN.

There is an underlying tone in the community but some of us make a living thanks to Microsoft.

I am impressed that they have done this, which is why I posted it.

technomancy• 14 years ago

I'd guess the fact that hackers are not often painfully forced to test software with products from other tech companies makes a big difference.

reitzensteinm2• 14 years ago

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 might not be around in a year or two. Nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft.

kator2• 14 years ago

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.

brudgers5• 14 years ago

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.

bad_user• 14 years ago

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

hkarthik2• 14 years ago

>> 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.

reitzensteinm2• 14 years ago

There's a very real truth to it, even if it is an exaggeration; large companies are not worried whether MS will be in business in 10 years.

Your example has the CTO coming in and changing one industry standard technology over another due to personal preference, and that's the reason he got fired. The story could just as easily been the other way around.

If a startup like Heroku comes along that's a more direct customer to AWS, despite being the darling of a site like this (myself included), nobody in enterprise land is going to touch it with a 10 foot pole. MS could compete toe to toe with Amazon for this business, and that's my point.

kator2• 14 years ago

This is awesome. I was in talks with them at my former employer and we were very interested in what they had but badly needed to be able to at least deploy a mix of Windows and Linux boxes. At that time the sales person we were talking to said he did not foresee a future where they would support linux.

And before the fanboi's jump on me about Windows, you can't get every video/audio encoder on the planet on Linux so sometimes we had to deploy Windows and OSX boxes to get all the various encodes we needed for our distribution. Some of the code literally was 10+ years old and the original companies out of business.

statictype2• 14 years ago

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?

d4nt• 14 years ago

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.

malachismith3• 14 years ago

The addition of long-running linux instances is one of the big wins here.

chrislomax3• 14 years ago

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.

statictype2• 14 years ago

Isn't it going to affect performance to have your server talking to your DB over the internet (as opposed to a local network which I presume is the case when running EC2 instances in the same availability zone)?

drivebyacct2• 14 years ago

You should probably look at what they launched today. They have VM instance images that are what you're describing.

Though they're probably still ephemeral, but then again, so are EC2's...

CookWithMe2• 14 years ago

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.

CurtHagenlocher• 14 years ago

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.

malachismith3• 14 years ago

You could always use AppFog on top of Azure. Then you get proper PaaS plus Azure IaaS....

edwinnathaniel2• 14 years ago

You can already drop a pre-configured Windows 2008 Server VM already before this news was out.

maslam4• 14 years ago

If you're watching the Scott keynote, Windows Azure now supports both PaaS and IaaS.

benwen• 14 years ago

Just got out of the first half of the Meet Azure prezo. Pretty slick integration of PaaS and IaaS. Git, Linux, Node.js, MongoDB, but also .Net, Team Foundation Server (ok, I had to look up TFS) and RDC. Has SQL Server as a managed service. Website hosting also: Wordpress, Drupal, etc. Caching (memcache-compliant) and Blob storage. Lots o' data centers. Identity management.... yeah Active Directory. They have multi-tentant (lower $) and reserved VMs (more $ and perf, tho not clear if everything runs exactly like on reserved VMs). Sounds like they've been hard at work. It'll be interesting to see how it works outside of a scripted demo. http://meetnodejs.azurewebsites.net/ is the node.js and mongodb demo they ran. Still seems to be up.

towndrunk• 14 years ago

I attended Microsoft's free developer camp for Azure and it's worth spending a day if you are looking to use Azure. You will come out of it with a good overview of all its offerings and abilities.

http://www.devcamps.ms/windowsazure

runn1ng2• 14 years ago

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?

facorreia8• 14 years ago

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.

runn1ng2• 14 years ago

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!

malux853• 14 years ago

so it's like App Engine has a bigger brother :)

I hate Google App Engine, I hope Azure is better

wslh• 14 years ago

I want to add that you can remotely debug your applications there using your desktop Visual Studio. I think this is an excellent addition.

kerbs• 14 years ago

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).

edwinnathaniel2• 14 years ago

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).

antninja• 14 years ago

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.

hkarthik2• 14 years ago

>> For a one-man project, nothing beats Google App Engine.

I'd argue that Heroku is even easier than App Engine.

tosh• 14 years ago

Azure is a product from Microsoft which competes with AWS (IaaS/PaaS) from Amazon and App Engine (PaaS) from Google.

vyrotek• 14 years ago

Check out http://www.meetwindowsazure.com - It's a live broadcast happening right now which will answer a lot of questions.

xxyyxyxyy2• 14 years ago

"... I never understood what Azure actually is. All I hear is some buzzwords."

A common problem in the software world, not limited to MS.

The question is whether this is intentional or whether the company lacks the ability to actually tell you. Communication with the customer might be handled solely by marketing executives who may not understand what Azure actually is. The code might be so needlessly complicated that even few developers have a wholistic understanding of it.

One of the great things about open source is that if the need arises the customer can find out what something actually is. The system can be disassembled into smaller parts for a better understanding. The source code for individual programs can be read. The code for the compiler is also open for inspection. This has great benefits.

ekiara• 14 years ago

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.

robinduckett2• 14 years ago

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.

http://i.imgur.com/2bNwU.png and http://i.imgur.com/2G8Pa.png

ovi256• 14 years ago

I see they use the minimalist Metro design even here. Judging the graphical design only, it looks pretty good.

facorreia8• 14 years ago

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.

duaneb• 14 years ago

> Windows 8 won't even run Silverlight.

They don't want their tablet users to use Netflix?

robinduckett2• 14 years ago

    <!--[if IE]>
    <script>
        if (!window.document.documentMode || window.document.documentMode < 8) {
            window.location = "/Error/Unsupported";
        }
    </script>
    <![endif]-->

rbanffy5• 14 years ago

I couldn't get to step 3 on the trial signup. I think we just DDoS'ed Azure.

"The resource you are looking for has been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable."

maslam4• 14 years ago

Hey, I work on Azure. I'd love to help you get past this problem. Can you email me at bilal dot aslam at microsoft dot com with the LiveID you were trying to sign up with?

vdondeti• 14 years ago

This will hopefully make it much easier to build sites that span multiple clouds or at least can failover to another cloud.

facorreia8• 14 years ago

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/

sixcorners• 14 years ago

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

regularfry• 14 years ago

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

malachismith3• 14 years ago

When Scott Guthrie spoke at Node Summit he was presenting off a Macbook Air....

RandallBrown2• 14 years ago

yes, a pretty old one. They haven't used that keyboard in years.

rbanffy5• 14 years ago

I doubt a Dell (or a Sony Vaio, full of blue LEDs) would convey the coolness the ad requires.

jmcqk62• 14 years ago

All platforms are supported for development on Azure. The SDK is rleased for Windows, Mac, and Linux

facorreia8• 14 years ago

It was very interesting to see the demos on Macs during this event. Specially when they showcased a website made on Node.js deployed via command line from a Mac consuming Mongodb hosted on Linux, all running on Azure.

outside12342• 14 years ago

Where in San Francisco is this streaming live from - can you attend in person?

facorreia8• 14 years ago

I'm not sure. Someone posted an invitation here a few days ago, but it seems to be sold out.

http://register.meetwindowsazure.com/?invite=17ae2e27-2b9d-4...

outside12342• 14 years ago

Does 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?

maslam4• 14 years ago

Hi, I work on Azure. We'll be opening signups after Scott's talk in SFO.

kenkam• 14 years ago

Really wanted to try this out, but I still can't get the preview of the new features -- it just says "coming soon". I'm in the UK and have MSDN subscription. Does anyone else have the same problem?

jebblue2• 14 years ago

Like many Cloud platforms it's a way to charge you by the minute for what the rest of us get for a flat monthly payment.

locusm• 14 years ago

I just ran the Phoronix iozone benchmark on a newly spun Ubuntu 12.04 Azure VM - it aint looking good... Comparison against a local VPS provider here in Australia. http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1206086-BY-1103157IV31

Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure

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