
Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure - gouranga
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/linux/
======
runn1ng
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?

~~~
facorreia
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.

~~~
runn1ng
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!

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

~~~
gouranga
Correct. They are dropping the Windows bit. Details here:

<http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-renames-azure-services>

~~~
facorreia
Not really.

<https://twitter.com/WindowsAzure/status/199918250652475393>

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robinduckett
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>

~~~
facorreia
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
> Windows 8 won't even run Silverlight.

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

~~~
facorreia
I should clarify that it's Internet Explorer _on Metro_ that won't run
Silverlight (as far as is known). And, in consequence, ARM tablets won't
either (because there will be no desktop mode, just Metro).

On the other hand, the new XAML-based API will be a somewhat easy upgrade path
from Silverlight app to native app.

~~~
__float
No no no! Windows on ARM _does_ have a desktop. But traditional x86[-64]
compiled apps will obviously not work. The desktop does still exist though.

~~~
facorreia
Thank you for the clarification. So current x86 desktop apps won't run, but
some might be retargeted and they would work.

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rkwz
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.

~~~
brudgers
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.

~~~
mcantelon
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.

~~~
RandallBrown
I think Windows Phone is a pretty solid innovation on the smartphone front.
It's UI isn't iPhone UI++ like Android, WebOS, and others. It's new and
interesting.

A lot of their living room entertainment stuff they've done with Xbox and
Windows Media Center has been pretty cool. Not necessarily groundbreaking, but
still neat.

~~~
leeohsheeus
...and, by extension, Windows 8 and the Metro design language, which are
pretty unique in the current tech landscape.

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statictype
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?

~~~
chrislomax
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.

~~~
statictype
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)?

~~~
AlisdairO
If you have significant write load it can be a very big deal. If you're read-
mostly and able to cache a lot, maybe not so much.

~~~
chrislomax
A majority of our writes are product updates but they are done directly into
azure from a local box. These can't be done from AWS as they go into gbs but
that is the only situation we need worry about.

If azure opened it's model up then we wouldn't need to do all this!

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kator
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.

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

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

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locusm
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>

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towndrunk
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>

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ekiara
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.

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

~~~
cbg0
Well, you can't run IE on Ubuntu.

~~~
nnnnni
ies4linux: <http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page>

~~~
tankenmate
winetricks is the proper way to do this these days, ies4linux has been
deprecated for quite some time.

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reitzensteinm
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.

~~~
hkarthik
>> 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.

~~~
reitzensteinm
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.

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outside1234
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?

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

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

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kenkam
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?

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jebblue
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.

