OpenLogic Backs Linux On Windows Azure With SLA 46
MikeatWired writes "OpenLogic announced on Thursday that it will provide CentOS Linux — and service-level agreement (SLA) support — through Microsoft's new Windows Azure gallery. Yesterday, Microsoft announced support for Linux instances on its cloud service, among other cloud news, in what Wired Enterprise's Cade Metz dubbed an Amazonian facelift. OpenLogic's Steven Grandchamp writes in a blog post that for 'enterprise developers and IT folks who are multi-source and multi-platform, today's announcement is good news. The Windows and Linux worlds take one step towards each other.' However, Grandchamp notes that despite Microsoft 'maturing its views on open source' with 'significant work' with Node.js, Hadoop, and Samba, the open source community 'will meet [Linux on Azure] with overall wariness and skepticism.' 'Some will view this with hope and a positive step; others will continue to be cynical,' he writes. 'For me, it's part of a larger overall process that continues to signal open source coming of age. What major vendor doesn't have an open source story now? It's such an ingrained part of development, from legacy to mobile to cloud, that we can't live without and we are figuring out how to love living with it.'"
Re:What OS is Azure based on? (Score:4, Informative)
It is a modified version of the NT kernel.
Re:What an idiot (Score:5, Informative)
Except this really has nothing to do with open source. MS offers a computing cloud, and they offer various options on the computing cloud because they want to make money. Some of those things happen to be open source.
MS open sourcing one of their major product lines would be open source news. This is 'cloud provider has wide variety of services'. It's not going to make open source OS's mainstream on the desktop, and there's a wide array of open source software for windows. Azure is (for the moment) an enterprise product, for enterprise users, and you're right, they've been readily using open source for some things since the 90's.
Microsoft never got much past 50% of the server market, and I think they're down around 40% these days, depending on how you count it. Considering azure is basically a giant platform service they couldn't aim to be a serious single solutions provider business and only host windows.
Re:Why CentOS instead of Redhat? (Score:3, Informative)
Just reading wikipedia's description: " CentOS exists to provide a free enterprise class computing platform and strives to maintain 100% binary compatibility with its upstream source, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)." - Why not just use Red Hat directly?
Because that way they don't have to pay Red Hat anything.