Microsoft is the largest single contributor to Linux development. They have a large hand in Kubernetes. .NET is open source and runs on Linux/Mac natively. They have released and are maintaining the most popular lite IDE/editor of the decade simultaneously for Linux/Mac/Windows, and it was open source from the start. MSVC has a Clang frontend.
That they are not relevant on mobile seems a non-sequitur. The discussion was on whether the Microsoft Windows-first culture has changed, and it clearly has. They have clearly embraced open-source as a good strategy for them, and are making massive investments in it.
I would also note that Azure, while having all sorts of unexpected limitations, is at least much more transparent about pricing than AWS. The Azure UI almost always includes pricing information on the resources you are creating, which AWS carefully segregates away.
The major revenue stream for Microsoft is still old long term licensing deal for office combined with windows and than related server technologies to support office applications.
The model changed from licensing+upgrade fee to new subscription fees. This can be office 360 subscriptions which get you office products and windows or volume license subscriptions. Depending on the type of subscriptions these are classified as cloud or windows and office revenue. Azure come into picture as those companies having volume licenses have applications in legacy .NET which they move to Azure.
Microsoft is supporting Linux today because they lost the battle of technical superiority and most of the azure workloads for supporting internal business apps run on Linux. They ported .NET to Linux just to have those old accounts do not move out of azure and Microsoft proprietary eco-system easily and move them to subscription with long term contracts.
Majority of the revenue effect you see is just because Microsoft abandoned product updates for old versions and forced customers to move to windows 10 and above by making old one economically very expensive. So Nadella was lucky because he got the benefit of the cyclical revenue increase due to enterprise upgrades which companies didn’t do for many years.
Obviously adoption of Linux as primary driver for Azure kept those old customers from moving out of Azure to Amazon or google, even though technically azure quality and services were inferior. A company will not move to amazon or google unless there is significant exponential gains. If the old vendor can still support and give something which is not bad but not the best, customer will still stay on and here Nadella was good not to bash Linux like Balmer.
Also .Net is synonymous with microsoft so there is no reason to trust AWS, it's not their priority, they are a Perl and Java shop in general.
AWS a Perl shop?
All of AWS services treat C# .Net Core as a first class citizen.
- CodeBuild has prebuilt C# .Net Core images for building apps. For licensing reasons they don’t have prebuilt Windows/Framework containers but their instructions are so clear that I was able to build one before I knew anything about Docker
- Lambda has native support for .Net Core 2.x and the C# SDK for AWS has a template to build a custom runtime for C# 3.x
- Speaking of which, the AWS SDK and plug-in for C#/Visual Studio and the corresponding Nuget packages are excellent and fully featured.
- The CloudFormation Developer Kit supports C#
- There are CodeStar and ElasticBeanstalk getting started templates for .Net Framework and .Net Core
What are they missing?
Regarding support for .NET whatever AWS does microsoft will always be way ahead of them. Microsoft is not elastic.co that AWS leech on and put the original guys on the side and don't contribute back. AWS is really like a leech on open source now trying to leech on Kubernetes.
They can do this with small open source project, not with the projects supported by google or Microsoft. Like when it comes to Kubernetes AWS is playing catch with Google. So AWS Fargate and other services are still inferior to Google managed K8s. Indeed microsoft at present is ahead of AWS in managed kubernetes services. Its just the initial head-start and developers who are familiar with AWS proprietary API's find it hard to believe that in such a short time the skills they learned is no longer cutting edge and google or microsoft proprietary API's overtaken them in performance and ease of use.
All of these things are widely believed myths that have little to no basis in reality.
It certainly was not designed as some kind of Perl hosting environment.
It didn't even host Amazon.com at all until many years after the fact.
Can you give one concrete example of where MS has a feature for .Net that AWS doesn’t have?
The only one that I can think of is that their lambda equivalent works with .Net Framework.
Amazon doesn’t care about EKS, it’s just a check box option to say they have it. Elastic Container Service is far more integrated with AWS.
Have you actually used AWS? Care to enumerate how it’s “inferior”?
I have yet to see any good open source project by AWS team in the wild like Kubernetes, Linux Kernel Namespaces and Cgroups, Map Reduce from Google or .NET from Microsoft. So far what I have seen is that AWS just leech on other open source like PostgreSQL to build Aurora and RDS service without really contributing back to PostgreSQL, because postgreSQL comes with BSD license AWS can just leech on it. Same for elastic search and many other open source they leech on. I am still waiting if they are really just leechers or giving back to the open source community. Like Amazon Redshift is based on an older version of PostgreSQL 8.0.2, and Redshift has made changes to that version [1], but nothing is made open source because BSD license do not require it. This is just one big example but there are many. For open source community and contributions I feel Google and Microsoft are much better than Amazon and AWS by miles. It's just that due to early start AWS is reaping benefits by leeching on open source.
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/c_redshift-an...
How does open source help an end user who is deciding which cloud provider to use?
AWS does not develop .NET SDK, as I mentioned in my earlier post there is no contribution of AWS in development of .NET, so they just provide infrastructure support of what ever Microsoft and the open source community releases.
In general microsoft acts as a steward to develop .NET and related infrastructure on Azure, then AWS copy and launch it as .NET infrastructure as service. They play catch up with Microsoft in this area.
I will stand corrected if you can show me that AWS (i.e. Amazon) has active open source .NET framework core developers in their internal team developing and enhancing .NET SDK or CLR open source versions.
They do the same with AI and ML Services. It is built using TensorFlow, sci-kit learn, pytorch, CNTK and various python and C++ open source libraries. Again I have yet to see example of AWS (i.e. Amazon hiring core developers of these libraries and release open source versions). They don't develop these libraries just leech on it to create it's own API's. I have yet to see any framework from AWS like TensorFlow, Keras, Pytorch and CNTK.
There is nothing to copy as far as .Net. Microsoft releases a new version of .Net, all AWS has to do is make sure that its SDK’s support it. But there usually aren’t any breaking changes.
As far as the other services that I could see needing to support, the only ones that I can think of is CodeBuild and lambda. For those two, you can create custom Docker images and runtimes respectively.
And the other question, are you a .Net developer?
I'm one of those persons who upsold friends, families and at least one boss on to use Linux.
I'm not a business analyst but I can say that Microsoft has transformed. I still prefer Linux as does a number of fellow sysadmins and developers, but Microsoft has changed to the point where they are not a problem to us anymore. Azure portal works equally well from Firefox on Linux as from Internet Explorer or Edge on Windows.
> as it runs as the main workload on Azure instead of windows. This is just done for survival, otherwise Microsoft would have gone to irrelevance.
The best reason for transformation in fact: because the subject realizes it is in their own best interest to change and it improves their situation.
> Windows and Office licenses are still the main driver for Microsoft, just with accounting tricks and office 360 made into cloud revenues.
I don't know.
> This is an investor story to jack up the stocks. They are no better than google when it comes to platform lock-in. On top of it having used Azure services, I can say without a doubt its inferior to Amazon and Google cloud experience.
I've used Amazon (two years, narrow experience) and Google Cloud (two years, broader but possibly shallower experience, certified) and now Azure lately.
So far, inferior is not the word I would use. I'd possibly stick with different or something neutral.
.Net Core is open source and available for Macs and Linux. It’s almost 5 years old now.
Windows and Office licenses are still the main driver for Microsoft, just with accounting tricks and office 360 made into cloud revenues. This is an investor story to jack up the stocks. They are no better than google when it comes to platform lock-in. On top of it having used Azure services, I can say without a doubt its inferior to Amazon and Google cloud experience.
Microsoft didn't transform it's just that enterprises who hold up upgrading Windows and Office did so after windows 7 debacle to Windows 10. This is just cyclical uptick, not really transformation, its just lucky Nadella. The only good thing Nadella did is, didn't take any disastrous decision to thwart the uptick by embracing Linux and trying open source, by understanding that if it's not done Microsoft will go the IBM path to irrelevance.
In the process Microsoft having an old relationship with enterprises helped them to move some workloads to Azure even though it is an inferior service, by supporting Linux and showing commitment to it for financial gain not out of goodwill towards open source.
Still today Microsoft relevance on mobile is due to its office products, otherwise it is as good as irrelevant on mobile application and development front. It's alive on mobile just due to proprietary platform lock-in to .NET. Now made it open source to try to increase the share as it's not as useful given the rise of nodejs, Python, rust and other platforms.