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Comment by awill | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondered how much of Azure is built on Windows Server (and .NET) vs Linux plus open source languages.

From 2019:

> It's not just Microsoft's Azure customers who are turning to Linux. Guthrie explained, "Native Azure services are often running on Linux. Microsoft is building more of these services. For example, Azure's Software Defined Network (SDN) is based on Linux."

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-developer-reveals-li...

Large chunks of it are still running on .NET, but nowadays, that's an open source cross-platform framework, so they're running it on Linux, mostly within containers.

Do you know their reasoning for doing it on Linux? Bigger ecosystem? Performance? I can't imagine licensing fees being an issue.

The choice of Linux was controversial when Azure was built. It caused a huge issue with the Windows Server team. But it's what customers wanted, and Azure was built very pragmatically.

Hotmail ran on Unix for years after Microsoft acquired it. It took quite some time for them to migrate it to Windows server.

Yeah they ran on FreeBSD, but despite multiple attempts IIRC they didn't fully pull off the migration until Windows 2000. There was a relatively honest paper they wrote about the transition: https://web.archive.org/web/20021021164226/http://www.securi...

Why would customers be concerned about what OS the service runs on? They want to be able to run Linux VMs but they don’t care what’s under the hood.

I would feel uncomfortable if my vm host ran Windows.

I wonder (more like, assume) that Microsoft has an own-rolled Linux distro. Surely they're not just RedHatting it in prod. Right?

https://github.com/microsoft/azurelinux

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