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Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure
- barryhunter 14y agoEven more telling, is Google Chrome is used as the browser in the demo video.
- cbg0 14y agoWell, you can't run IE on Ubuntu.
- nnnnni 14y agoies4linux: http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page
- freehunter 14y agoIt's not supported anymore. YMMV when trying to install it.
- tankenmate 14y agowinetricks is the proper way to do this these days, ies4linux has been deprecated for quite some time.
- mtgx 14y agoThat'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 14y agoWhy 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 14y agoThis looks like a normal news submission to me. The comments aren't bad either, except for yours ;-)
- m0skit0 14y agoI 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.
- brudgers 14y agoI'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 14y agoI 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.
- kenjackson 14y agoBut there is no real Amazon competitor in SV -- at least not where they dominate -- merging product/delivery with web services.
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- reitzensteinm 14y agoIn 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.
- kator 14y agoIMHO 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.
- brudgers 14y agoI 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 14y agoIn small companies / startups I'm pretty sure people can and have been fired for buying Microsoft.
- hkarthik 14y 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.
- reitzensteinm 14y agoThere'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.
- kator 14y agoThis 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.
- statictype 14y agoI 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 14y agoGood 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.
- malachismith 14y agoThe addition of long-running linux instances is one of the big wins here.
- chrislomax 14y agoI'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 14y agoIsn'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)?
- chrislomax 14y agoI thought this but after doing some tests the results are pretty negligible. A windows 2008 server license on 2 machines for fall back comes in at around £700 - £800 a month per instance. The same redundancy on Azure is around £80 - £100 a month. If it doesn't work then we go back to the drawing board, if it does work then we have saved ourselves an almighty chunk of money. We cache a lot of data in our application too which we are putting into elasticache, which is local to EC2. We haven't used it in great stress yet but initial tests were very good
- towndrunk 14y agoI 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 http://www.devcamps.ms/windowsazure
- runn1ng 14y agoPardon 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 14y agoWindows 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.
- malux85 14y agoso it's like App Engine has a bigger brother :) I hate Google App Engine, I hope Azure is better
- JW_00000 14y agoCare to explain why you hate App Engine so much?
- malux85 14y agoYep sure. - It's speed is very unpredictable. Sometimes it'll be lighting fast, other times requests will hang for up to 8 seconds. We've used nodes in data centers across the world to measure this and have confirmed 100% that the delay is happening at App Engine and not our machines :) - There's been several times where I have used Google Python libraries (for other Google products) and found them incompatible with the version of Python on app engine. I've had to write several dummy modules that replace googles ones that attempt to open a file on the disk in write mode (not allowed) when they're not even writing to the file! I cant be specific, under NDA. I have contributed the fixes back to the Google API team. - The last 3 SDK upgrades has broken something in the core modules, or Django. App Engine SDK upgrades are now a running joke at my workplace - It's insanely expensive for the CPU / DB power that you get
- ekiara 14y agoOFF 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.
- robinduckett 14y agoThis 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 http://i.imgur.com/2bNwU.png and http://i.imgur.com/2G8Pa.png http://i.imgur.com/2G8Pa.png
- ovi256 14y agoI see they use the minimalist Metro design even here. Judging the graphical design only, it looks pretty good.
- facorreia 14y agoThey 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 14y ago> Windows 8 won't even run Silverlight. They don't want their tablet users to use Netflix?
- chc 14y agoThere will probably be a Metro Netflix app. I think that's the idea.
- facorreia 14y agoI 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.
- vdondeti 14y agoThis will hopefully make it much easier to build sites that span multiple clouds or at least can failover to another cloud.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- facorreia 14y agoFor 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/ http://www.meetwindowsazure.com/
- sixcorners 14y agoIs... Is that a picture of a Mac? (http://www.meetwindowsazure.com/img/home/hero.png http://www.meetwindowsazure.com/img/home/hero.png)
- regularfry 14y agoA lot of MSers use Apple hardware, I wouldn't be surprised.
- malachismith 14y agoWhen Scott Guthrie spoke at Node Summit he was presenting off a Macbook Air....
- RandallBrown 14y agoyes, a pretty old one. They haven't used that keyboard in years.
- rbanffy 14y agoI doubt a Dell (or a Sony Vaio, full of blue LEDs) would convey the coolness the ad requires.
- jmcqk6 14y agoAll platforms are supported for development on Azure. The SDK is rleased for Windows, Mac, and Linux
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- facorreia 14y agoIt 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.
- outside1234 14y agoDoes 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 14y agoHi, I work on Azure. We'll be opening signups after Scott's talk in SFO.
- kenkam 14y agoReally 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?
- jebblue 14y agoLike 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 14y agoI 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 http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1206086-BY-1103157IV31