Microsoft Spins Its Own FreeBSD Image For The Cloud

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Microsoft Spins Its Own FreeBSD Image For The Cloud

Last year Microsoft announced their own Linux platform used by their Azure cloud in the networking space while now the company has announced their own FreeBSD spin for use by customers as a VM OS...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Microsoft-FreeBSD-Azure-Spin

[ElectricPrism]

So...

[Luke_Wolf]

I wouldn't use Azure personally, but this is a really good thing for FreeBSD as someone as big as Microsoft acknowledging them helps put their name out there again and will possibly draw in new developers.

[torsionbar28]

This is pretty meaningless, the only reason they're supporting it is because so many virtual networking appliances are based on FreeBSD. BigIP F5, pfSense, etc. Nobody who is an all (or even mostly) Linux or FreeBSD shop is going to be using the Microsoft cloud. That's nonsense. It's like thinking that an all-Microsoft shop is going to call LiNode for their hosting needs.

[LEW21]

Phase I (Embrace) finished, starting phase II (Extend)...

[nanonyme]

This is pretty meaningless, the only reason they're supporting it is because so many virtual networking appliances are based on FreeBSD. BigIP F5, pfSense, etc. Nobody who is an all (or even mostly) Linux or FreeBSD shop is going to be using the Microsoft cloud. That's nonsense. It's like thinking that an all-Microsoft shop is going to call LiNode for their hosting needs.

There are software houses though whose product has *nix backends and Windows frontends (read: desktop clients). Microsoft is probably tuning Azure to make it more inviting to such parties for end-to-end testing

[unixfan2001]

Phase I (Embrace) finished, starting phase II (Extend)...

They've already extended things.
They're unlikely to extinguish anything.

Anyhow. Gotta go and buy some stock in aluminum. Tinfoil seems to be a bestseller these days.

[gotwig]

I wouldn't use Azure personally, but this is a really good thing for FreeBSD as someone as big as Microsoft acknowledging them helps put their name out there again and will possibly draw in new developers.

"Microsoft is offering their own spin of FreeBSD via the Azure Marketplace. Microsoft has spun their own FreeBSD 10.3 image that differs from upstream FreeBSD." AHA! New developers? This thing is fucking BSD license, and thats the ONLY reason M$ stole it from bsd, because they can just steal it and make their own proprietary shit thing and never give back changes.

[Passso]

Phase I (Embrace) finished, starting phase II (Extend)...

As long as they extinguish FreeBSD and leave Linux IDC

[Michael_S]

Nobody who is an all (or even mostly) Linux or FreeBSD shop is going to be using the Microsoft cloud. That's nonsense. It's like thinking that an all-Microsoft shop is going to call LiNode for their hosting needs.

If you hunt around for statistics:
- 80% of the Fortune 500 companies use Windows in some capacity.
- 90% of the Fortune 500 companies use Linux in some capacity.
- 25% of the virtual machines on Windows Azure run Linux.

So the majority of big businesses have a hybrid environment. I hate Microsoft as much as any other free software fanatic (and I don't mean 'free software fanatic' in a pejorative way), but they're just being practical here and trying to capture as many customers as possible.

My wild guess is that most companies want to run everything on Linux or FreeBSD purely for cost reasons but it will take decades to transition all of their legacy software off of Windows.