Microsoft and Red Hat partner
blogs.microsoft.com
blogs.microsoft.com
Who's the main target for Azure? Enterprise companies who trust Microsoft implicitly. When an exec comes to the head of IT and says "we need to be on the cloud! I read about it!", Azure eases the transition by being able to go to vendor you've already been using for a dozen years.
RedHat's core audience is enterprise as well. RHEL is the de facto standard for that level of infrastructure due to the support you can get versus any of the distributions that are equally as good, but minus the support contracts.
So, they're helping each other out and that's good in my humble opinion.
Microsoft's new direction under their new CEO is one surprise after another. I've only tinkered with Azure so far but makes me want to pay MS more attention than I would have a couple years ago.
And different Linux flavors were already on Azure as "applications" prior to this deal.
But now RedHat is getting the official stamp.
If Azure the OS only had Windows the App, that would be a great failing. MS is smart and playing Azure out to not just promote other MS products. Expanding it as an ecosystem for various OSes is a Good Thing.
I say this as someone who works for an ISV that is single-handedly responsible for the only Linux servers most of our customers have.
They are using Azure as a loss leader to get you hooked, then the price goes up. This new SaaS world is kind of like buying cars.
1) The reseller doesn't know how it runs over Azure (I had this with vendors sticking to in-house Sharepoint vs Sharepoint online mostly from a "we don't know how" angle we found out)
or
2) Does the reseller also make money from in-house vs on Azure? Like, their hardware? Anything like that? Just curious.
I mean, he could also honestly think that Azure isn't there yet either. I could just be curmudgeonly and doubting the reseller.
I've seen folks spend 3-4x more money (almost all of the excess to the SAN vendor) to get a VMware setup (because snapshots and VMotions) with the same reliable I/O a commodity Dell server with a 4-disks SAS Raid-10 and a decent RAID controller can deliver, not even talking SSDs here.
We always said to use "the right tool for the right job", isn't it? There are a lot of apps for which virtualized infrastructure is just not a good fit from a technical standpoint. When these end up in the cloud because suits decided OpEx is sweeter than CapEx, they suffer horribly; the customer ends up paying more (because prolonged I/O spikes in the cloud can be hugely expensive), the application runs slower than it did 5 years ago on commodity hardware, and nobody is happy.
Still, suits decided cloud it must be, so cloud it will be. Sometimes the IT sector is depressing.
That said, nothing big, and planning to migrate things to linux solutions but time and motivation don't always align for personal stuff at the end of the work day.
They seem to be one of the better options if you need hosted windows anything as part of your cloud strategy. And having played around with Azure's other services [1], it seems to work pretty well all around. I did find the default interfaces for Azure's storage a bit difficult to work with, so I created a wrapper with imho a nicer interface.
Since Ubuntu ruling the cloud instances this also makes sense for Red Hat.
It would be cool to get numbers across all providers, in terms of deployed instances of this or that OS. There's a good story to write, there.
That's were Canonical began to gain traction regarding installs, yet they still can't find a way to get users into support contracts en masse like Red Hat has been able to.
Citation needed. If Amazon Linux is still the default, you're wrong. It is based on CentOS, uses RPMs and yum.
(And I edited my comment since the wording was unclear... sorry if that caused confusion)
Ubuntu has gotten some solid traction in the "web" end of things, while RH is more "infrastructure".
I don't know about that, it all seems fairly logical. Don't forget that Microsoft is primarily a "business business" rather than a software business (ie. optimizing for business longevity above all else).
Microsoft appears to have practically perfected the game of "maintaining vendor lock-in in an otherwise open ecosystem". That game requires "giving in" at times, when it is no longer viable (in the long term) to compete with other options.
A good example of this is the open-sourcing of .NET. I don't believe for a second that this was a change of heart of a developer or even a team - it is far more likely that Microsoft is realizing the increasing shift away from Windows and .NET, and towards more 'open' platforms (whether Python, Node.js, Ruby, Golang, or whatever else).
It is in their best interest to make .NET open-source, as it allows them to maintain their foothold in the application development community - it still has direct integration with the rest of their products (and thus incentivizes picking MS as a vendor), but can now compete on openness.
You can see something similar for Windows 10, and it being given away for free. Both OS X and Linux are increasingly eating away at Windows' marketshare. By offering it for 'free' to existing Windows users (ie. nearly everybody), they can attempt to win users back, as it is now offered at the same price (in the eyes of the consumer).
Throughout the existence of Microsoft, they have consistently pushed the boundary of vendor lock-in and marketshare, trying to keep it as closed as possible but as open as necessary. The more recent decisions from Microsoft are not surprising to me at all - they are simply the result of a rapidly changing computing landscape. Microsoft hasn't changed, their environment has.
Microsoft open sources their languages and then buys out the company that does the best job in making it crossplatform with as many platforms as possible.
What Microsoft can't do they usually buy out a company that can do what they can't. Getting Visual Studio for other platforms is near impossible for them, so they open source the CLR and compilers and see who can do a better job at porting them to other platforms.
Microsoft makes a lot of money selling Workstation and Server version of Windows to businesses as well as Visual Studio licenses and BackOffice (SQL Server, Exchange Server, ISA Server, Sharepoint, etc) for Windows Servers to make custom apps on. Not to mention Office licenses and other software for businesses.
New CEO got Microsoft into the Cloud and Cloud services, so it only makes sense to make a deal with Red Hat for an Azure Server deal to sell to more businesses that want a GNU/Linux solution with paid support.
For people dealing with Microsoft for many years... this is the surprising part.
This was the biz model for LinuxCare.... but they failed.
That's the point of a partnership.
The basic I/O, compile & runtime performance was significantly inferior to xen & kvm (didn't bench against vmware, phasing it out due to cost), it wasn't worth any effort to even deploy apps for testing.
Therefore I don't see Linux on hyper-v being a compelling option for the cost conscientious technical officer or lead engineer.
There are a great number of variables that come into play with configuring each hypervisor. Also, considering continual updates, a solid analysis 6 months ago may be stale. Not to mention most of the studies come from the vendors, not from independent parties.
Question: does anyone know of an ongoing/reliable performance review of the major hypervisors?
Network on Azure though is a totally wrecked thing:
- A0 instance is capped to a miserable 5 megabit/s uplink (downlink is fine);
- If you want TCP/UDP ports open, you need to open them one-by-one, going through a 2-page wizard with 8 fields in total to fill in for each port you are opening, and then waiting 15-20 seconds for each "change" to be applied. Good luck opening a 1024-port range for your SIP server;
- You can't open ICMP/GRE/IPSEC or any other custom protocol;
- There are ton of really weirdly configured network gear between your VM and the Internet - packet drops and private IPs in traceroute, etc...
- On a plus side, you can enable so called "direct server return" and you will get incoming packets with your public IP as a destination IP; a really nice feature sorely missing on AWS.
I thought it was 10Mb/s?
>If you want TCP/UDP ports open, you need to open them one-by-one, going through a 2-page wizard with 8 fields in total to fill in for each port you are opening, and then waiting 15-20 seconds for each "change" to be applied. Good luck opening a 1024-port range for your SIP server;
...or use the powershell cmdlets and do it in one line
Alas... Also, in my experience, throttling is really slow to react, i.e. you get a chunk of data out at 10-20Mb/s, then everything freezes for few seconds until average would drop below 5Mbps, then another speed-up/slow-down cycle. Long-term average is exactly 5Mbps as per their spec-sheet [1].
[1] http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/1/1/411621F0-D0BF-4...
[2] https://www.oaklight.us/2014/06/azure-network-speed-quick-te...
Never used the cmdlets for Azure and it's been a while that I dealt with it, but that sounds like an issue you'd only do via the web interface if you're insane.
Thanks for pointing those out!
Many large providers are numbering their hops with private IP space and routing public space across it because they don't want to waste /30's of public space for each point to point.
Yes, /31 is an option, but there were a lot of edge cases or network gear that didn't support it.
Which bring a related question - what's up with none of AWS/Azure/GCE supporting IPv6?
There are some things wrong on your comment, please let me comment on them:
I don't think A0 are capped at all, I don't know where did you get that:
user@A0VM:~$ speedtest-cli
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Testing from Microsoft Corporation (40.113.XX.XX)...
Selecting best server based on latency...
Hosted by KsFiberNet (Wichita, KS) [45.26 km]: 139.703 ms
Testing download speed........................................
Download: 44.48 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed..................................................
Upload: 22.54 Mbit/s
I just had to run one single test to get these results. Multi-threading will probably pump this up (let's say a multi-thread iPerf test between two VMs on two different regions, through their public IP addresses).
(Funnily enough this VM is in Dublin, hence the latency to Wichita).
You can get access to all your TCP/UDP ports by adding an instance-level IP: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/documentation/articles/vir... (you can later protect it with NSGs --> https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/vir... ). What you've seen is when you create endpoints on the load balancer that points to the VMs behind it. Now in Azure Resource Manager, spinning up a VM from the new portal will actually get you an ILPIP and no load balancer by default.
About that statement about a ton of weirdly configured network gear: Well, for starters you're doing network virtualization here :) but seriously now, the platform doesn't forward ICMPs to/from Internet, so I'm curious about those private IP addresses on a traceroute (and of course the packet drops). If you're talking about hops between you and the VIP (the load balanced public IP in front of your VM), that's probably your provider, other providers and finally Microsoft's Network. As per the rest of the path, you've said that ICMP doesn't go through, so traceroute it's not going to work (tcptraceroute also needs ICMP to work :)).
Speed test though... hm... 22Mbit/s is not exactly unrestricted, plus not sure how long is the burst that "speedtest-cli" makes. In my experience A0's uplink is burstable (but unusably slow when recovering from a burst), with long-term average being bang-on 5Mbps.
I do of course see exactly one "my" private IP in traceroute, but I'm not talking about that. I meant there are microsoft's private IPs (#12-#15) and dropped packets (#16 and on).
And of course, "platform doesn't forward ICMPs" is an annoyance in itself - i can't even ping my own VM.
# target IP anonymized, but still have enough granularity to reproduce the traceroute
traceroute to xxxxx.cloudapp.net (191.235.128.128), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 0.093 ms 0.117 ms 0.063 ms
2 193.47.232.12 (193.47.232.12) 0.785 ms 0.785 ms 0.776 ms
3 microsoft.mix-it.net (217.29.66.112) 1.219 ms 1.233 ms 1.225 ms
4 xe-0-1-1-0.fra-96cbe-1a.ntwk.msn.net (207.46.42.12) 8.700 ms 8.902 ms 8.430 ms
5 * * *
6 * * *
7 104.44.9.142 (104.44.9.142) 42.112 ms 39.194 ms 38.987 ms
8 * * *
9 be-6-0.ibr01.dub30.network.microsoft.com (104.44.4.142) 39.738 ms 38.266 ms 38.929 ms
10 * * *
11 ae2-0.db3-96c-3b.ntwk.msn.net (204.152.141.81) 36.986 ms 36.984 ms 36.925 ms
12 25.149.64.247 (25.149.64.247) 36.951 ms 36.775 ms 37.152 ms
13 10.10.132.81 (10.10.132.81) 36.917 ms 37.477 ms 37.287 ms
14 10.60.31.77 (10.60.31.77) 37.317 ms 37.699 ms 37.899 ms
15 10.60.31.69 (10.60.31.69) 37.653 ms 37.326 ms 37.441 ms
16 * * *
17 * * *
18 * * *
19 * * *
20 * * *
21 * * *
22 * * *
23 * * *
24 * * *
25 * * *
26 * * *
27 * * *
28 * * *
29 * * *
30 * * *
My comment about the traceroute was because you previously said that you've found those weird IP addresses between the VM and Internet. That's not how I actually see it, but I get your point, too.
The ones you identify as packet loss are just the ones you didn't get an ICMP back. I don't know anything about your background, but as per my experience with networking I've stopped considering traceroute as something remotely useful further than the first hop long ago, especially on environments outside my control (i.e. Internet). There are things out there like ICMP throttling and the fact that I could send you the "TTL Expired" ICMP identifying myself with any IP address. Remember the "Star Wars traceroute"? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/15/star_wars_traceroute... (doesn't seem to work for me now).
(About #12, WTF? Weird!)
> (About #12, WTF? Weird!)
There is a fairly boring explanation to that. Similar to public IPv4 exhaustion, RFC1918-style private IPv4 addresses can easily be exhausted in a big private network as well. If you have noticed, MS has actually run out of RFC1918, and uses RFC6598 (a.k.a. 100.64.0.0/10) network in Azure for their "classic" segment. 100.64.0.0/10 was not supposed to be used as RFC1918-style general-purpose private IP space, but rather as a local side of a CGN pool. But then again, if you squint a bit, well... it's still private, so will never be advertised into the Internet, so it's fair game to use it if you run out of RFC1918, right?
Some people choose to squint even further, and declare anything that is not advertised into public BGP as a fair game. I've seen a big ISP "borrowing" 44.0.0.0/8 (amateur radio AX.25) subnet to deploy video segment of their huge "triple-play" network. 33/8 (US DoD) is also popular as "borrowed" private space, 1/8 was fairly popular until it actually became real public address space handed to APNIC (oops!). Now we have an example of using 25/8 like that as well.
Currently working at a large MSP, and all of our stuff is still IPv4 only. Although we happen to have a ton of extra IPv4 space, so we aren't as concerned, but there is no movement towards IPv6 at all.
In view of today's news, this is not funny at all.
netname: UK-MOD-19850128
descr: UK Ministry of Defence
country: GB
org: ORG-DMoD1-RIPE
admin-c: MN1891-RIPE
tech-c: MN1891-RIPE
status: LEGACY
mnt-by: UK-MOD-MNT
mnt-domains: UK-MOD-MNT
mnt-routes: UK-MOD-MNT
mnt-by: RIPE-NCC-LEGACY-MNT
created: 2005-08-23T10:27:23Z
last-modified: 2015-07-24T14:31:16Z
source: RIPE # FilteredI generally work with Azure CLI (https://github.com/azure/azure-xplat-cli) and ARM templates (https://github.com/Azure/azure-quickstart-templates), helps with simpler configuration and consistent results across deployments.
Though we are aggressively working on adding more features and improving documentation, evidently there are gaps in certain areas. Please feel free to reach out to us through Twitter (@AzureSupport) or Stackoverflow (tag-Azure), for anything we can help with your deployments on Azure.
The game are tools like Kubernetes and Apache Mesos. I have X thousand VMs spread out through the world, with a few hundred per datacenter for geo-stability.
If a network link fails, no biggie. Still runs. If a rack dies, still no biggie. Redundancy makes it work. Earthquake/tsunami/natural disaster ? Your stuff still runs, with a bit higher latency and slower throughput.
The difference between hypervisors for IO is tiny. They're all slower than native, but vary very little between one another. That's why the manufacturers have all almost given up trying to use performance for comparison, and instead argue value adds/management/automation/cost.
If you really found one specific hypervisor slower than another (regardless of which two), I'd want to look at your exact test conditions since that has never been the case for me (everything else being equal). And even the manufacturers don't argue that point much.
There are plenty of reasons to e.g. pick AWS over Azure, but Hyper-V performance is not one of them. That's just FUD.
After reading your comment, and admittedly not knowing much about hypervisors (yet), I am genuinely curious as to what else could be causing this drastic difference in performance, if not for the hypervisor itself. Any ideas?
Real hypervisors are utilising a lot of hardware features to accomplish jailing. Client hypervisors may or may not be, depending on how they're implemented, and or how they're integrated into the underlying OS (e.g. specialised drivers, just simulating hardware features, etc).
You should be looking at dedicated virtualization hosts to do an apples to apples comparison, like vmware on bare server metal vs hyperv or any of the free tools also on metal. Not on a cpu throttled desktop.
I would always separate benchmarks for server or desktops.
I would expect a full description of the benchmarks and setup to follow up.
For example, we found two orders of magnitude performance difference between PV and HVM on ec2 on fork-heavy CI jobs. A difference between 3 and 30 minutes. This difference is trivially reproducible by measuring the time taken to complete a fork() syscall. As the memory size of the parent process grows, the difference becomes more pronounced.
Here's actual data I collected from c3.large instances, using a contrived Ruby one-liner to benchmark fork():
PV: [ec2-user@PV ~]$ ruby -e'$ref=[]; (24..29).each {|n| $ref << "X" * (2 n); start = Time.now.to_f; fork.nil? and exit!; puts Time.now.to_f - start; sleep 1}'
0.00550532341003418
0.011992692947387695
0.02542281150817871
0.05213499069213867
0.10562920570373535
0.21283364295959473
HVM: [ec2-user@HVM ~]$ ruby -e'$ref=[]; (24..29).each {|n| $ref << "X" * (2 n); start = Time.now.to_f; fork.nil? and exit!; puts Time.now.to_f - start; sleep 1}'
0.0005323886871337891
0.0007219314575195312
0.0012335777282714844
0.002183198928833008
0.004210233688354492
0.008102178573608398
As you can see, the difference is considerable. This is all on Amazon ec2, the only difference between these VMs is PV versus HVM.
(edit: HN formatting seems to be eating the exponent operator in the "2 to the n" expression. It's a double *)
also note that fork() involvs "lots of" io computations which could also be a driver problem and they evolved in newer kernels, too. and also fork() could syntactially be different on hosts with ballooning and hosts without. especially on kvm.
edit: as of today we switched to hvm instances (however we are on many many micros so that performance boost is likewise zero) on our inhouse hardware we are varying between kvm and vmware. however I dislike vmware more and more. vcenter is just unusable (flash) and consumes a shitload of memory. so mostly we use vmware api calls which makes vmware unnecessary somewhat. also we sell our software as a appliance with a xenserver host and mostly we tested our software an all ends and we are mostly disk io driven and that barely changes between them. there are some aspects that could improve performance but that depends more on how you configured your virtual disk.
32bit, or 64bit pre-virtualization hardware extension (vt-x/d, ept, amd equivalents) are really the only ways this should have been the case. Each time you make a fork() system call on 64bit PV you're making an extra context switch and flushing the TLB that an HVM instance does not need
I'm not sure of any way to get a console through IE. Can you explain?
(1) https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn282274.aspx
"The Linux services will go live on Azure at 4 a.m. EDT on Thursday. At that time, the Azure portal will offer a number of Linux distributions, including Suse Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2, OpenSuse 12.01, CentOS 6.2 and Canonical Ubuntu 12.04. Azure users will be able to choose and deploy a Linux distribution from the Microsoft Windows Azure Image Gallery."
http://www.pcworld.com/article/257073/microsoft_to_run_linux...
Or you could always load your own distro of choice in Hyper-V.
So you can spin it both ways, really.
http://news.microsoft.com/cloud/index.html
You're welcome to spin anything you like.
No spin would have been "both companies ironed out an agreement allowing their products to be commercially supported when working together, three years after Azure launched support for Linux systems". I know, not sexy.
I don't see why you're quibbling about "late". It's a fact that it's more than three years later than a bunch of other versions. But hey, you can have your own spin.
> InfoWorld: Microsoft has a close business relationship with Suse Linux. That seems to be Microsoft's Linux of choice, and the company doesn't seem interested in having the same kind of partnership with Red Hat. Is that a problem for Red Hat?
> Jim Whitehurst: We'd be happy to work on interoperability with Microsoft or anyone else.
So yeah, Microsoft made a specific choice to partner with SuSE. RH said "whatever". Three years later, an agreement was finally struck between the two.
Did RH "come around"? Or did MS finally recognize SuSE is a losing proposition? You don't know and I don't know, but implying one side took action without having any proof for it is, well, spin.
I don't know Red Hat that well (it's a few years since we've talked), but it has a strong focus on its own cloud business (1). It might have seen Azure as a rival to Red Hat cloud services, but that's just my speculation.
(1) https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing
BELOW
> I have no horse in this, no investment, nothing; I just don't like unsupported bias. Can you say the same?
If you really don't like unsupported bias, perhaps you shouldn't post comments that reveal so much of it ;-)
> Yes, it is "just your speculation".
You could also cut out the cheap tricks. I referred specifically to the comment on Red Hat's motives, not to anything else.
That's nice to know and I'm sure everyone always means well, but it doesn't change anything in factual terms. I don't know Red Hat but I'm sure they'd like to support as many cloud services as possible.
> It obviously didn't just support SuSE, so your implied either/or is just yet more of your spin.
Dude, honestly, I'm only reading what you linked, with InfoWorld saying MS had a preferential agreement with SuSE. I didn't link that, you did; if it doesn't agree with your view, why did you link it?
Your first list had SuSE (twice), CentOS and Ubuntu, and again I took it at face value, so I don't think I implied anything.
I have no horse in this, no investment, nothing; I just don't like unsupported bias. Can you say the same?
> It might have seen Azure as a rival to Red Hat cloud services
Sure, exactly like Microsoft might have seen Red Hat as a rival to Windows Server in the cloud.
> but that's just my speculation.
Yes, it is "just your speculation". That's what I said, and why I responded to your initial comment. Maybe because of insider knowledge you might have, you're interpreting facts in a somewhat biased view. That's fine, but you cannot assume everyone shares this particular view of the facts and spin it as an absolute truth.
IMHO we've said everything that needed to be said so we might as well close it here.
https://www.suse.com/company/press/2015/suse-is-now-part-of-...
"Collaboration on .NET for a new generation of application development capabilities, providing access to .NET technologies across Red Hat offerings, including OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which will be available within the next few weeks."
Further development of .NET as cross-platform, not just Windows-based? That could bode well for the stack.
I doubt I'll ever write .NET code again, but this seems like a sensible decision to me.
And if you like functional programming, use F#. It's pretty great.
Just decent? I dissagree, it is the best language to my taste.
>NET MVC, though, is far from impressive
Tell me what is impressive them, becuase to me is a well stablished, easy to use and learn with static typing, there is nothing better.
>The routing is crap
The routing is highly configurable, by default it mimics Ruby on Rails routing and if you don't like it you can use your own, you have no idea of what are you talking about.
>Razor is designed to encourage you to dump C# straight into your views
Just like in JSP pages you can write Java code, or in ERB pages you can write Ruby code or in EJS pages yu can write JavaScript code, and if you don't like there a re plenty of options.
>which I really don't see as the future of web development
Your personal views are just that, personal, at least inform your self well before making ignorant statements.
As is yours, so why bicker?
C#/.NET is also my favourite, but it's not the be-all and end-all of web development. It might be the best for all of your projects, but not for everyone else.
It has it's flaws, like everything else, and I'm happy for you that you haven't used it (or anything else) for long enough to discover them.
ASP.Net MVC, is very subjective. It definitely is very 'weird' from the perspective of being on a static language platform but embracing 'magic' over standard type safety.
I will give you routing though, i dont really think it 'sucks' but i have lead development teams using MVC for years... whenever a new developer who isnt familiar comes on board, the most significant 'learning curve' is the routing... i am not really a fan myself but i understand what the value proposition is...
I can be civil till certaint point, but how to be more civil when you have no idea of what you are talking about and instead of admiting it you just keep making more ignorant statemens?, just say "I have no clue" and that's it, nobody is going to judge you.
>the fact remains that the default routing system is fairly mediocre, for no particular reason
You keep repeating the same as a broken record, yet, you have presented zero evidence, there is no route that I have implemented in Java that I wasn't able to replicate in the same way or even more easily in .NET, be it MVC or Web Api, so please, present some evidence or go home.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/review/product-reviews/re...
I started w/ Slackware and moved to Red Hat and then Fedora but eventually RH and Fedora became "the Linux that couldn't" when I was installing on either an old or new machine. On the same machine Ubuntu would install just fine.
I run a Windows desktop now and mostly use Ubuntu Linux in AWS, sometimes inside a VM on my local machine. I used to run the RH-derived AWS Linux, but eventually I learned how to do things easily in Ubuntu, such as installing and maintaning an Oracle JVM, that are hard in Red Hat. Definitely an enthusiast could find a solution with RHEL, but having a server OS that "just works" is what you need if you are the guy who splits his time between devops and bizdev.
That means that for N cloud hosts Red Hat would have to potentially build N different patches for any update or security fix.
Now you can't certify software to run on "RHEL 7" anymore, it has to be "RHEL 7, assuming it has XYZ, which some cloud hosts don't".
It can be done, but it's a huge hassle, it's much easier to just ship the same distro to everyone. Space is cheap.
Why would they have to do that? AFAIK, patches apply to packages, not the entire distro. If $package_x isn't installed, it doesn't get the patch. If it is installed, it does get the patch.
And for me, the concern isn't space, as much as running processes, and littered un-needed files.
I think this whole line of argument is just some misplaced nostalgia for distro micro-optimization. It's not the mid-90s anymore. Space and CPU is cheap, you're not going to gain anything significant by trimming down your distro.
If those things were actually important you wouldn't be using Azure in the first place.
For server stuff, .NET is now close to the level of openness and compatibility that the OpenJDK enjoys. If you like C# or F# better than Java, there is plenty of reason to switch.
It's important to note that all of this applies to the OpenJDK too[3]. So you are at least no worse off if you make a leap from the JVM.
[1]: https://cla2.dotnetfoundation.org/cladoc/net-foundation-cont...
[2]: http://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/dotnet-integrati...
[3]: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oca-405177.pdf
edit: word choice
That's not the point of this. MS is positioning Azure as the cloud for enterprise. Azure can run a bunch of hosted services you had to administer yourself (Active Directory, Office 365, etc.), it can run any Windows server apps you had, and now it can run enterprise Linux apps on the most popular enterprise Linux distro. So if you're a company that has Office, Active Directory and an Oracle database running on RHEL, you can move your everything into Azure.
Radio Shack sold Tandy HD machines running Xenix to business customers. In fact, Radio Shack stores themselves used a POS system running Xenix, up until the mid 1990s at least.
Microsoft sold Xenix to SCO in 1987.
Microsoft partnered with Novell (SuSE Linux), and there was no happy end for one of them (Novell is no more; SuSE Linux once a major distribution next to RedHat is a shadow of its former self). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novell#Agreement_with_Microsof...
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2654097/linux/the-microsoft...
Only for them. Novell bet big on pivoting on Linux and then crashed.
"I went to Novell under the mistaken goal of being a CEO. I didn’t do the due diligence, and if I had, I wouldn’t have gone. Our basic goal was to get out with our professional reputations intact and not end up in jail. The books were cooked, and people were frauds. But it turns out you can overcome that, and the skills I developed helped at Google."
https://medium.com/cs183c-blitzscaling-class-collection/cs18...
Microsoft also started writing dozens of apps for Android and iOS while Ballmer was in charge.
"Collaboration on .NET for a new generation of application development capabilities, providing access to .NET technologies across Red Hat offerings, including OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which will be available within the next few weeks."
Xplat .net is coming to RC1 in a couple of weeks (per roadmap: https://github.com/aspnet/Home/wiki/Roadmap) and it's exciting to see that RHEL will support it. It makes sense for Microsoft, traditionally an enterprise company on the backend, to partner with a *nix company with, primarily, enterprise clients on the backend.
If nothing else, the toolset microsoft brings to the table will raise all boats on the -nix side IMO.
Source: http://slashdot.org/story/01/06/01/1658258/ballmer-calls-lin...
I would assume Redhat-required shops would be running some pretty heavy, sophisticated workloads.
Amazon Linux is based on Redhat. CentOS is a Redhat recompile, so you can say anyone using that is also using "Redhat". US govt almost exclusively uses RHEL when they mean "Linux". Also banks, healthcare, etc.
RedHat's userbase is basically the opposite side of the spectrum from Ubuntu users flying by the seat of their pants with that popular free server thingie they heard about.
It seems to be by far the most popular version used by governments and large corporations.
"We're an enterprise software company. You're either consumer or enterprise. We're enterprise."
In addition, you may also need patent indemnification and reliable security updates (we leaned on Red Hat heavily during ShellShock and others). For example, before I release a Linux image I have a checklist of 450+ items, including things like NIST certification. Red Hat streamlines this process as it has already been certified across the most strenuous of regulatory and compliance environments, and we can reuse much of that work.
This isn't important for a clothing website startup for example, but for aircraft, CT scanners, anything ISO compliant, finance it is paramount to what is being delivered.
If you want support from Oracle and you're not running on RHEL or Oracle's own offering, the answer usually is, "Get back to us when you can reproduce it on a supported flavor of Linux."
Or let's look at when Microsoft partnered with Novell:
http://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-makes-linux-pact-with-nov...
The byline from that article is classic! "Former software foes pledge to work together to help Windows world and Linux world interoperate."
Turned out great for Novell, right? Hah! Does anyone use SuSE anymore? It's market is so tiny it's hard to find statistics for it.
Other fun Microsoft partnerships: Nokia, Barnes & Noble, Best Buy, Yahoo, Nortel, Sendo, and probably dozens of smaller companies that came & went or are but a fraction of their former selves.
A more interesting thing to track: How is the partnership with Microsoft working out for Docker? I'm really curious what the heck Microsoft is going to do in the next version of Windows Server to actually support realistic containerization.
Microsoft made a pact with Sun back in the day where they would support Java. If memory serves, Microsoft supported a Java that only worked on Win32 using J/Direct calls that natively supported Win32 instead of being OS independent like most Java apps.
/s
So, Red Hat is the next Nokia now?
Systemd would be right at home in Windows.
Visual Studio's page now mentions Git, a GPLed piece of software built for Linux kernel development. They've come a long way from "GPL is cancer!"
Not nice to use, in my experience, but it is officially from MS.
They laid a lot of groundwork for mistrust, so they'll have to undo that, and it won't be quick or easy IMO.
Also relevant to "Microsoft's love for Linux":
Microsoft Says 1.5 Million Enterprise Users Have Deployed Windows 10 https://redmondmag.com/blogs/the-schwartz-report/2015/08/ent...
Bank of America CTO Talks Windows 10 Plans, Security http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/executive-insig...
"Reilly promised a Windows 10 upgrade is on the horizon for Bank of America. "We're looking to adopt as early as we can," he said. Such a project will be a massive undertaking given the sheer multitude of Windows devices within the organization, but he appears optimistic about the process."
I was a Microsoft sceptic, but Windows 10 has me convinced http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/i-wa...
"Then, last week, at an event hosted by CIO magazine, where I gave a keynote, I spoke to a group of Chief Information Officers of large and midsized companies about technology trends. The vast majority said they were buying Microsoft's Surface Pro tablets for their users and upgrading desktop machines to Windows 10."
See also: Configure telemetry and other settings in your organization https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt577208%28v=vs....