Microsoft has made Azure Linux generally available | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft has made Azure Linux generally available

theregister.com

48 pointsseanhunter41 comments

Right, more vendor lock-in. I don't know what companies are thinking when buying into this Azure ecosystem. It will put you at the complete control of Microsoft for all your Cloud needs. I totally get it, Microsoft has control of desktop, so why not give them the Cloud too? But Cloud is just starting, we don't know where it is going and how big it will be, does it really make sense to put all eggs in the MS basket now? On Kubernetes even? Which is supposed to be Cloud agnostic. I would be very cautious about these moves... embrace and extinguish is a good tried and tested strategy.

Because for most companies switching infrastructure/service providers is as hard as switching banking services.

I have only heard start ups that really need to optimise cost by doing this. But big enterprises and finance companies haven't seen it happen most likely those companies don't really mind vendor lock-in for a nice discount.

Most companies using anything MS on the dev side are neck-deep in it. Most .NET stacks don't go beyond JS and F#. It's a catch-22 where the in-house won't learn outside the Microsoft-approved stuff, so the best new fits are bound to the Microsoft stack and the ones making decisions go for more vendor lock-in stuff, etc.

I've had managers push for Blazor several times, despite the market of capable frontend devs who know/can learn JS being far bigger, and the technologies being more mature and proven. They aren't worried about vendor lock-in, they encourage it.

It's a shame too. Much of their tech is great, but we are seeing several of the good old M$ shenanigans popping up again, after their 'big open source' push.

Not been a .NET developer for a decade. C# was king. Has that changed? Is F# popular now?

I would say F# is as popular as it’s ever been.

C# is still king, but it’s been getting a few features from F# the past few years.

I don't think you know what you're talking about, or maybe you're just not phrasing it in a way that I can't properly ingest. Azure Linux isn't required if you want Linux on Azure, just like Amazon Linux isn't required if you want Linux on AWS.

Also, Microsoft are all-in on cloud stuff; this is where they are placing their bets. accordingly, Windows server and client operating system strategy are not designed to lock you in any longer, certainly not like they were 20 years ago. It was awful when they were, and they don't really care much about those in comparison to the past.

Microsoft want you to be a Microsoft 365 customer and they want you to be an Azure customer.

You can natively run lots of Linux distributions inside Windows, which cleanly integrate with the host Windows OS and Microsoft promote this as a first-class way to develop software for Linux and Windows. This is the opposite of lock-in.

Azure Linux is a Linux you might choose if you are already on Azure. You are not required to use Azure Linux when using Azure, or anything else.

"oh no, Microsoft have released a free Linux distro and are abiding by license terms!! LOCK IN!!" Come on.

> On Kubernetes even?

While I agree with the spirit of your post, I think k8s is a great counterexample. Of course there is a ton of things that is vendor dependent, and you can be sure each vendor will try to exploit that, but overall it's the closest thing to avoiding vendor lock-in that we have now.

Maybe 2 years ago I'd hesitate to say that as k8s was just a part of the equation but now that I've been successfully running a Postgres operator without any problems for a couple of months I feel it finally feels like a more complete solution that you can deploy in any environment in a way that is an order of magnitude (or two) faster than traditional migration from one environment to another. Specifically, it lets you avoid many services that are called "cloud-native" which basically means "harder to migrate from".

The organisation I'm currently working for is trying to move everything to the MS ecosystem. It's all being decided by executives who have no business reason to do so, it just seems like a 'good idea'. I'm not exaggerating. They really are that stupid and they're prepared to throw a lot of money away doing it. They're like sacrificial goats that lie on their back with

   --- 8>< --- cut here ---

tattooed across their rich, juicy belly.

There are even talking about using Microsoft's analytics, you know, big data lakes, Spark running over clusters, the fucking works. But they have very little data to analyse, no idea whatsoever what they're analysing for, and no one in the organisation seems to have any knowledge of statistics, analysis, ML, or as far as I can tell, anything beyond basic mathematics.

No common sense, no ability to listen. Fuck it.

Edit: meanwhile the plebs on the ground are suffering from a lack of knowledge and even basic software tools. It's like top management are trying to compete with Liz Truss for who can do the worst possible job.

your management are being sold on a completely different plane of value than you.. you are chattle, livestock.. MSFT is selling coordinated livestock management equipment, with reporting and metrics at every step, remote surveillance too if that is what management wants. You are the last in the chain and you are not in the loop.

Ooh this sounds familiar a lot also has to do with getting finances. A manager once explained it too me, see if i make a down to earth presentation to investors i might get just enough money. But if i use the fancy flavour of the year tech terms i know im guaranteed to get enough financing and maybe even enough to expand.

May be you are in a position where you don't understand long term goal/vision of the company.

Most of the business want to concentrate on their core business than mucking around IT or software. They would be happy to throw few million bucks to Microsoft or other stuff and make billions out of their core business.

Read my para about analytics and see who's 'not understanding'.

They aren't in the stratosphere far beyond my sight, they are just stupid.

Poj8900

A web search gets me a dishwasher and a camera. Some explanation would help.

I’ll be honest, as someone old enough to have lived through the animosity, I never thought I’d live to see this. I’m glad they acknowledged the history and bad blood caused by Balmer et al. Rolling their own distro makes sense in that context. I wish them well. Strange times!

I'll be blunt: you're a fool if you believe they've changed. EEE is still in their blood and always will be.

Small example, I have to use Outlook at work and it's quite noticeable that they've broken RFC 3986 ("Using <> angle brackets around each URI is especially recommended as a delimiting style for a reference that contains embedded whitespace")

More to the point especially in my job, they very noticeably broken the SQL standard, and keep doing things to make my professional life harder.

You are really, really naïve if you think they've changed.

Look at win 11 too. The ads and news shit. How outlook has to open edge until one day it pops up an option not to but begs you not to take the option. The telemetry. The need for an MS account to install it (or find a workaround not to).

I have a colleague who thinks the same and I can't believe one could be so naive. Nobody cares about Ballmer & co. anymore: what's important is what MS is doing now. And they show utter contempt for the user, right from the moment when they try to create an account, to the point when they try to use their system with spamware in the start menu and fraudulent links on the home page of their default browser.

Of course they have to support Linux on Azure otherwise they would lose customers, but this is just a pragmatic approach and you can be sure they will do whatever is necessary just to make money, whether it's using Linux or anything else.

I feel exactly the same way. I also feel like Microsoft's recent strategic moves (eg the AI-powered content graph thing they announced at Build[1]) are really interesting. It's so incredibly strange to anyone who lived through Ballmer, the SCO suit etc to see this.

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/microsoft365dev/build-2023-bu...

> lived through the SCO suit

I understand what you mean, I was there in 2003 as well.

However, the youngest among us have also "lived through the SCO suit". The "final" SCO suits were only settled in November 2021 and in fact, the group which inherited SCO Linux has filed brand new suits in 2021 as well[0].

Note that SCO went bankrupt a decade before their lawsuits were wrapped up. The legal action was ongoing for 19 years. Something to remember when there's a potential you may have to fight someone with deep pockets, regardless if you're in the right. Even bankrupting your attacker may not spell the beginning of the end for your legal troubles.

0: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/xinuos-finishes-pick...

Sure but the period I'm talking about is the "groklaw"/Boies Schiller Flexner period.

We’ve been running Mariner Linux in Production for just over a month and it’s been absolutely rock solid. Nice to see this get an official name.

I’m genuinely sick of Ubuntu, and for our non-AKS workloads I really hope this becomes an option there too.

Absolutely rock solid. For a month.

How many are you running?

And what Linux Distros are not rock solid? Never had a problem with the OS part of the equation.

We’re running seven clusters comprising of about ten nodes each. So seventy total.

Ubuntu has been mostly faultless also, but having maintained my own Kubernetes Distribution based on Ubuntu it was an area getting increasingly complex with no obvious benefit, netplan, for example.

Can you share bit of details on what's wrong with Ubuntu and how CBL plays better for you?

My context is baremetal servers and LXD based virtual environments.

Having used Ubuntu MAAS for network booting and provisioning a self hosted system I find it hard to imagine using anything else. It’a nice.

Take a look at Foreman. Fills a similar function but imo you can do more with it. I set it up in production for a university and have nothing but good things to say about it.

I am a big fan of Azure but MS's vendor lockin strategy has left a very bad taste in my mouth. Perhaps all cloud services are like this but my main beef with them is they make it difficult and inrediblu costly to get security logs out of their platforms to somewhere else and what I've heard consultants who look at many customers' deployments say is the same thing, great product but hope you like vendor BDSM.

I partly get it, but the strategy of getting as many products as possible from one vendor is horrible these days, pick a different vendor just to force them to prioritize getting along with other vendors.

If you are a C-level exec, be cautious of this. Get at least 3 cloud providers and force people to use both so they can move around and save on costs. The more people do this, the less hostile these enormous cloud providers get.

I just use Splunk forwarders and indexers on Stack Hub. Log analytics on Azure Cloud. What issues are you having? I couldn’t get our security team to approve the use otherwise

NSG flow logs, storage container access logs and in general MS insisting on using graph api for logs, eventhub hasn't been better but all of it costs a lot in just egress and inter-regional data transfer costs, unless! You use their security products and sentinel!

This is what I use for NSGs:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/developer/terraform/...

But I do a lot at the Edge because I am required to as opposed to “Azure Proper” so I am my own MSP.

Being subscription level is a big problem. Not just implementation complexity but cost.

Stack Hub/Edge is also subscription based. It’s all in what you pay for. But all cloud services are ‘subscription based’

No, I mean azure subscription, as in not tenant level.

> “The reason we chose not to fork a different distro … Microsoft has kind of a history with Linux. … I think the Balmer quote is from 2001, but a lot of the sentiment still lingers even today. Part of the reason we did not choose to start with a distribution and then fork it for our needs is we didn’t want to be seen as doing the embrace and extend thing again, we didn’t want to wake any of that up, we figured, build it from scratch, we can tailor it to our needs … we’re scratching an itch we had and offering the solution back to the community.”

> Azure Linux is designed to be deployed in the cloud and run multiple containers

So nothing to do with linux except the kernel and some utilities.

"We're scratching an itch we had and offering it back to the community."

Is there a git repo one can peruse?

https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner

(Based on following links from https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/use-azure-linux )

Extend and lock in.

there should be a catch

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