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Red Hat and Microsoft Partner On Azure (redhat.com) 130

An anonymous reader writes: Satya Nadella has made some interesting reforms to Microsoft. Today, Red Hat and Microsoft announced that they will partner to deliver Red Hat's product suite in Azure. Red Hat will also support .NET core in RHEL. Additionally, Red Hat's CloudForms product will now work with Hyper-V/Azure, RHEV, VMware, and AWS. Microsoft has certainly come a long way from the Halloween Memos. Here are Red Hat's blog post and Microsoft's blog post about the announcement
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Red Hat and Microsoft Partner On Azure

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  • by MagickalMyst ( 1003128 ) on Wednesday November 04, 2015 @10:31AM (#50863315)
    Hell just froze over.
    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      A) There has been hypervisor cooperation on both sides for ages so that each other's products ran on each other. This makes sense since 1) it avoids accusations of monopoly behavior 2) it create's a duopoly locking out other smaller competitors.

      B) Remember Microsoft not so long ago ended up contributing to Linux.

      C) If you want to Embrace, Extend Exterminate then you first have to Embrace. The article is wrong. This is a move straight out of the Halloween.

      Hell will freeze over when Microsoft starts activ

      • Like the Linux kernel to which they are big contributors? You can already run Ubuntu and Centos Linux on Azure. This is just another option.

        • by Rob Y. ( 110975 )

          Right, and Red Hat was the last, why? Probably because Microsoft had hoped that by supporting Red Hat's competitors, it could put a dent in RH's profitability. Since Ubuntu and Centos don't have viable server business models, supporting them doesn't threaten Microsoft. Of course, if there were more of a market for Windows cloud solutions, Microsoft probably never would've supported Linux on their cloud at all. And I'm guessing that the same goes for Red Hat - there wasn't enough demand for Ubuntu and Ce

          • by Anonymous Coward

            Likewise, i believe Microsoft's Linux kernel contributions are all in support of getting Linux to work as an Azure VM. I guess that counts as 'contributions', though it's pretty self-serving.

            Almost all contributions to open source are self-serving, people contribute fixes because they need them fixed and add features that they need. Most kernel devs are paid to do their work, you think the people paying them aren't doing it because they need the features?

            I suppose you could say that's what the GPL a

            • by Rob Y. ( 110975 )

              I didn't say there was anything wrong about self-serving kernel contributions - just that it's misleading to portray them as Linux-friendly, or as improvements to Linux per se.

              The OEM's are paying because it's cheaper to pay than to fight. That says nothing about the quality of the patents - just that Microsoft is being smart about extracting money from those patents. Just because it's cheap enough that the OEM's are willing to pay it rather than fight, that doesn't mean it's not blackmail. And the reaso

    • since before their IPO. This isn't that surprising at all other than that they survived this long and are now wanting to work together with said Evil.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Hell just froze over.

      Just froze over? How long has it been now that RedHat has been behind an init/monitoring system that does the embrace, extend, and extinguish Microsoft Way proud? Even prouder because that system is supposed to be easy-peasy for mere users but is actually a morass of strange borg-like binaries designed and implemented by evil geniuses who don't want you to look at it too hard?

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04, 2015 @10:34AM (#50863339)

    I'm not surprised. After all, the architecture and philosophy of Red Hat's systemd appears to be very much inspired by the architecture and philosophy of Windows. Systemd is all about one-thing-doing-everything-poorly, which has typically been the Windows approach, rather than the traditional UNIX approach of many-things-each-doing-one-thing-very-well. Systemd represents the Windowsification of Linux distributions, which have traditionally taken a much more UNIX-like approach. Bringing Windows and systemd/Linux together like this makes perfect sense, because they do complement one another due to their similarities.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Ok, I have to ask. While I understand why everyone is upset with systemd, why don't other similar programs get the same level of snub? OpenBox taking the place of a shell and a litany of GNU utilities is probably the most obvious example.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        OpenBox, whatever it actually is, wasn't forced into Debian, Ubuntu, and pretty much every other major Linux distro completely against the will of the users of these distros. That's a big part of the reason why people don't dislike OpenBox. People don't get angry with something if it doesn't cause them any problems. But people do get royally pissed off when something totally unwanted is basically forced up their rectums. That's exactly what systemd was like to many Debian users: repeated, forced penetration

        • That's a big part of the reason why people don't dislike OpenBox. People don't get angry with something if it doesn't cause them any problems. But people do get royally pissed off when something totally unwanted is basically forced up their rectums.

          Yeah, that's exactly why I don't dislike Apple nearly as much as I dislike Microsoft, despite all these claims about how evil Apple is these days. Sure, Apple is evil, but I'm not being forced or pressured to use Apple products. I don't spend all my free cash o

          • by lgw ( 121541 )

            I see the reverse as you, and despise Apple by your same rationale. Of the "big 5" software companies, only at MS itself are you likely to find an environment dominated by MS. I hate having that Apple shit forced on me, itherwise I wouldn't care much about Apple.

            • Huh? WTF are you talking about? Where on Earth are you where you're having Apple shit forced on you? Are you in a parallel universe or something?

              At ANY corporate or government job in the US, you are absolutely going to have MS shit forced on you. Everyone uses MS here. There is a very, very rare (usually small) company which uses Apples, but everyplace else you go, it's all MS. Even if a company uses a lot of Linux, they usually use MS for regular Office programs and Outlook email, and you end up usin

              • by lgw ( 121541 )

                The big 5 are Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. All but MS are Apple shops for laptops (and all but MS and Apple are Linux shops otherwise). Amazon and I think Facebook allow MS, but support is second-class and MS is discouraged. Google and obvious Apple only allow MS for specific business needs (competitive analysis, cross-compat testing, etc).

                • You do realize that these "big 5" represent a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the total employment in the US (and world), don't you? And I'm pretty sure Intel is a bigger employer than several of these; it currently has 106,700 employees. It's a mostly MS shop. And IBM is still bigger than any of these, with 380,000 employees currently.

                  Now I'm curious, so I went ahead and looked these up. Facebook is a puny, puny little company, with only 10,082 employees. That's a tiny 1/10 of the size of Intel. Apple i

                  • by lgw ( 121541 )

                    I speak only to my personal experience, not the rest of America.

                    • I don't give a shit about your personal experience. My whole point is that, for most people who have any kind of corporate job involving sitting at a computer, that computer is going to be running Windows. If you've avoided that somehow, then good for you (or not, if you hate Macbooks and got stuck with those), but if you believe that your experience is commonplace, you're completely deluded. Your personal experience is irrelevant for the hundreds of millions of us out here who are stuck using Windows at

                    • by KGIII ( 973947 )

                      Err... If you didn't care then why'd you ask 'em where they worked? Sheesh. ;-) They tell you and you tell 'em you don't care. Silly kids these days.

                    • by lgw ( 121541 )

                      Oh, you ranted about how you, personally, don't like MS because in your personal experience it was forced on you. Well, I have the same rant about Apple. Different people have different experiences and values, and what a boring world it would be if we were all the same.

                  • You're right. I even think the number of Amazon employees includes the warehouse personnel, supply chain management staff, and some guys who convince (sales guys, actually) vendors to sell on Amazon. Some of these kinds of people may not be getting company laptops, and even if they do their primary work may not be "defined" by the OS on that laptop.

                    • Warehouse personnel probably don't get issued computers at all; they probably have handheld devices, and probably use a few centralized computers, so they probably have to use Windows on those, but they probably don't spend that much time with them. The handheld devices are very likely to run WinCE, however, which is another kind of hell. Any kind of management staff or salespeople, however, would be using Windows all day on company-issued computers.

    • Poorly? Not so. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by emil ( 695 )

      I have something like the following inittab fragment that I built on my production servers:

      ds:4:respawn:/home/prog/schedule.sh
      da:4:respawn:/home/prog/alert.sh
      cx:4:respawn:/home/prog/update.sh
      cx:4:respawn:/home/prog/audit.sh...

      These shell scripts mostly set a number of environment variables, then exec a runas.c program that I wrote that knocks the privilege down from root. After privilege is dropped, my runas program calls exec() on the *real* program that I want init to respawn.

      This works, but it's a

      • by jonwil ( 467024 )

        The reason many people hate systemd so much is that it goes against the core philosophy of Unix as originally thought up by Ken Thompson all those years ago.

        The philosophy of having programs that do one thing and one thing only but do it right.

        There is no reason you cant have a modern init system (including the ability to do the things you get out of that systemd config file and to do parallel startup of software and other things) that is JUST an init system and doesn't try to take over su, logs, inetd, ntp

    • "After all, the architecture and philosophy of Red Hat's systemd appears to be very much inspired by the architecture and philosophy of Windows."

      s/Windows/launchd and SMF/

      FTFY. HTH.

  • Cue the comments about angry people switching from RedHat to another Linux distro.

    Fight for your bitcoins! [coinbrawl.com]

    • Re:Oh boy (Score:5, Interesting)

      by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Wednesday November 04, 2015 @11:05AM (#50863629) Journal

      Cue the comments about angry people switching from RedHat to another Linux distro.

      I switched years ago. I'm not angry, but redhat just fell behind in being good for what I wanted.

      From what I remember, of digging through the init scripts, it's not surprising that systemd came out of Redhat. A good part of it is meant to speed up booting. Certainly back then, the people at RedHat coldn't write shell scripts for crap. The boot scripts were terrible convoluted messes. No wonder it booted slowly.

      I actually cleaned up the X11 start script hugely, because one of the features I wanted was actually completely unreachable after they'd essentially rewritten it 3 times from 5 to 5.2 to 6, and then concatenated all 3 versions. I submitted a bug report and patch which went into a black hole.

      I don't see any pressing reason to switch back to redhat any time soon.

      • Why do you still hold a grudge to them? The versions that you mention are ancient.
        • Why do you still hold a grudge to them? The versions that you mention are ancient.

          What part of:

          "I don't see any pressing reason to switch back to redhat any time soon."

          Sounds like a grudge?

        • Indifference is different from grudge. Parent says he couldn't be bothered to switch back. Could mean either grudge or he's simply happy with his marriage.

          • Definitely the latter, or happy enough. I've got a couple of ubuntu machines and one Arch machine. Ubuntu has it's problems too, but it's still fairly easy to get to grips with and I'm used to administering it. There's also the handy PPAs for more timely updates of things. Arch is fun and always up to date, and easy to configure to do strange things.

            RHEL has possibly even longer support (haven't checked), but I don't see myself needing anything even approaching 5 year's support at the moment. When it comes

      • by KGIII ( 973947 )

        A long time ago, in a computer shop, I bought a copy of RedHat. A few weeks later, I bought a copy of Slackware but I think it was off the 'net. I think it came with a book - but not RedHat. I think RedHat had a help file CD and maybe a booklet. Anyhow, I installed Slackware first and played with it for a while (I seem to recall we had to start xserver manually back then). Then I played with RedHat for about three days.

        I haven't used it since. CentOS, yes. RedHat, no. It just didn't seem very good and that'

        • A long time ago, in a computer shop, I bought a copy of RedHat. A few weeks later, I bought a copy of Slackware but I think it was off the 'net. I think it came with a book - but not RedHat. I think RedHat had a help file CD and maybe a booklet. Anyhow, I installed Slackware first and played with it for a while (I seem to recall we had to start xserver manually back then). Then I played with RedHat for about three days.

          I got RedHat 5.2 from a bookshop for about 30 quid (maybe more?) and it came with 3 books

          • by KGIII ( 973947 )

            I must confess... I sometimes still compile my own kernel just because I like watching the text scroll by. I'll download a make from source just to see it, if I'm bored or just wanting to watch it. I don't really know what it is but it's still magical. Of course, my terminal is a gray (almost black but not quite) background with green text.

            I don't recall my version of RedHat coming with books? I think it had a CD with it but it may have actually been a floppy now that I think about it. I really don't recall

  • Trust Issues (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04, 2015 @11:08AM (#50863659)

    And after three decades of Microsoft earning zero trust I think I'll continue to take a pass. ...And remain skeptical.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04, 2015 @11:16AM (#50863733)

    I would add Red Hat has come a long way too. Away from the free software community on which they were built. Forcing systemd down our throats. They are no better than Micro$oft. There was a time when such a collaboration would have been unthinkable.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Nighttime ( 231023 )

      Why yes, because Red Hat don't contribute anything back to the kernel, sponsor a community distro or open source the software from companies they buy. We don't need their type around here! </sarcasm>

    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      I'm not thrilled by systemd, but Debian accepted it also...even if I don't know why, and suspect that the procedure violate the guidelines. But there may actually be some valid reason for it, even if none of the justifications have made much sense to me.

  • by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Wednesday November 04, 2015 @11:36AM (#50863927)

    We're in the middle of the planning for the Windows 7 to 10 transition, and 2008 R2 to 2016, so we're getting plenty of face time with the premier support guys. The message is abundantly clear -- Microsoft is done selling one-off licensed software. Everything is going to be Azure based in their mind, and on-premises installations of software are the exception now. Server 2016 has so many Azure hooks that it might as well not have been released as a standalone product. Windows 10's updating model relegates stable releases to a much more minority position than they were in the past...it requires an Enterprise Agreement/Software Assurance to deploy Windows 10 LTSB and avoid constant cumulative upgrades.

    In an environment like this, where they're moving back to mainframe style custodial IT service models, why wouldn't they partner with Red Hat or any other OS vendor for that matter? They want companies to move everything into Azure, not leave some bits hanging out on-premises or with another cloud provider. The Windows vs. Linux wars are cooling off because vendors sense the juicy returns in the cloud. Why sell software once when you can force businesses to pay over and over again for decades to use your resources/products? I've said before that both Amazon and Microsoft are building their clouds on the backs of Bubble 2.0, so funding is plentiful and therefore prices are incredibly cheap. The thing to watch will be when the bubble bursts, and a duopoly exists...will those low prices continue?

  • by selectspec ( 74651 ) on Wednesday November 04, 2015 @11:41AM (#50863961)

    Microsoft should buy RedHat and provide offerings that make RHEL more compatible with a Microsoft server environment. Makes total business sense for both companies.

    Otherwise, Amazon Web Services is going to eat their lunch (both Microsoft's and RedHat's)

  • by wiredog ( 43288 )

    then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

    We won.

    • You are the champion, my friend.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      We won.

      Who won? Red Hat is diverging from the Linux and open source ideals more blatantly every year. Soon it will be essentially indistinguishable from MS.

      • by thule ( 9041 )
        Ooooooooooooooh really? RedHat has dropped million and millions of dollars acquiring software and then they open source it. Seems like they are staying *very* true to their roots.

        According to wikipedia, Arch Linux, CoreOS, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Mageia, openSUSE, Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and Ubuntu all have systemd. Most of those are very recognizable names. So why just pick on RedHat?
  • Apart from the colour of the aforementioned main, what's an Azure and why would I want one?

  • by Anonymous Coward

    .NET as a default? Long term damage to Linux' reputation is where that'll go, due to the bad performance of most everything .NET regardless of platform. People will just say "it's slow" instead of understanding that "it's slow because it's using .NET". What a sorry direction to go.

  • Am I the only one who instantly thought that RH has been sucked into the MS EEE vortex? I hope this isn't the Embrace step of the classic MS behavior. Actually, have there been ANY companies that have benefited long term from working with MS?
  • 'All the same, let's be clear that all the "Microsoft Loves Linux" hype I saw at SUSECon yesterday and at other events earlier this year is just not true. Microsoft Azure loves Linux, there is no doubt; it is a basic requirement for them to become relevant on a cloud market dominated by AWS and Linux.' ref [google.com]

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