I think it's not so much "open source is our future" as it is "if you can't beat them, join them". I'm sure there are plenty of folks at Microsoft who realize that sticking with Windows in Cloud puts them at a competitive disadvantage vs eg Amazon or Google. There are things that _have to_ use Windows (Azure AD, MS SQL, Exchange, Sharepoint), but everything else is only harmed by it. So the litmus test is going to be whether they actually move their major backend systems to Linux in the coming 2-3 years. If they do not, all these Linux ports will remain second class citizens compared to Windows versions, with lower performance, fewer features, and more bugs. Which is probably why Microsoft is releasing them in the first place: if you want the real deal, come to papa.

It's sort of comical you say Azures is a competitive disadvantage. Azure and GCE are in almost every way superior to AWS in terms of everything but established marketshare.

If I were going back to step 0 with a startup today, I would not repeat my decisions to stick with AWS. Their stack is slow-moving and frustrating. The VPC rollout has been a slow motion car crash that is only righting itself in the past 3 months. Meanwhile Azure has amazing management tools and GCE has got well-supported containerization as its primary product interface. Both provide competitive rates and subsidies for small tech business, as well.

I didn't say Azure is at a competitive disadvantage (though it is, when it comes to Linux -- their Linux VMs are substantially slower than competition). I merely said that given choice, people prefer Linux as a platform, and they do so for a reason: better tooling, less vendor lock in, greater variety of free/libre backend software and frameworks, to name just a few. Windows really is redundant in this environment.

I was doing some benchmarking on AWS, GCE and Azure at various price points for some research and didn't see Azure perform much worse for similar price points to AWS. Everyone is slower than GCE.

Do you have references for the assertion? I'm entirely happy to say I did the tests wrong, I did them as a trio of evening projects.

My workload was CPU-bound. Test TensorFlow CIFAR model training on the VM with the same amount of CPU on all three major providers. In my case Azure was ~30% slower, whereas GCE and AWS were neck and neck.

Interesting. My workload was more a mix of artifical network and CPU tasks. I'll revisit with this.

Thank you.

Here's why their Linux ports, at least for open-source won't necessarily become second class... if they're used and popular with developers... that's it.

The DevOps trend, and developer mindshare is paramount regarding their cloud initiatives... Azure AD and Office 365 will keep things floating, but only Azure as a whole will keep it alive beyond XBox...

Microsoft is very good at tracking and keeping with developer mindshare, as well as adapting. They're also a large corporation with many nooks and crannies, so there are exceptions to everything. The change lately is the acceptance that windows is waning... and they have to shore up other areas even at the cost of windows for the larger company to survive... this is a colossal shift that can't be underestimated.

As a result initiatives that may have never seen the light of day around .Net as a whole, VS Code (with great go and node support), and a slew of other nice things coming from MS would never have seen the light of day. I am surprised how much I like using VS Code on OSX, I switched from Webstorm and Sublime, even with some rough edges in es6/7 syntax support. DNX and .Net Core stuff has me considering .Net and Mono again when I'd all but written them off.

I was forced to work with Azure late last year, and after writing some simpler wrappers using some of their APIs have to admit that I liked using them more than AWS. It's really interesting that the less I rely on MS, the more I appreciate the work they've put out there.