Reinventing Software Development and Availability with Open Source: an Interview with One of Microsoft Azure's Lead Architects

Petros Koutoupis — Fri, 07 Dec 2018 13:00:00 +0000

Microsoft was founded in 1975—that's 43 years ago and a ton of history. Up until the last decade, the company led a campaign against the Open Source and Free Software movements, and although it may have slowed the opposition, it did not bring it to an end. In fact, it emboldened its supporters to push the open-source agenda even harder. Fast-forward to the present, and open-source technologies run nearly everything—mobile devices, cloud services, televisions and more.

It wasn't until Satya Nadella took the helm (2014) that the large ship was steered around. Almost overnight, Microsoft embraced everything Linux and open source. It eventually joined The Linux Foundation and, more recently, the Open Invention Network. At first, it seemed too good to be true, but here we are, a few years after these events, and Microsoft continues to support the Open Source community and adopt many of its philosophies. But why?

I wanted to find out and ended up reaching out to Microsoft. John Gossman, a lead architect working on Azure, spent a bit of time with me to share both his thoughts and experiences as they relate to open source.

Petros Koutoupis: Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?

John Gossman: I'm a long-time developer with 30 years of industry experience. I have been with Microsoft for 18 of those years. At Microsoft, I have had the opportunity to touch a little bit of everything—from Windows to other graphical applications, and more recently, that is, for the last 6 years, I have worked on Azure. My primary focus is on developer experience. I know this area very well and much of it comes from the Open Source world. I spend a lot of time looking at Linux workloads while also working very closely with Linux vendors. More recently (at least two years now), I stepped into a very interesting role as a member on the board of The Linux Foundation.

PK: Microsoft hasn't always had the best of relationships with anything open-source software (OSS)-related—that is, until Satya Nadella stepped to his current role as CEO. Why the change? Why has Microsoft changed its position?

JG: I have spent a lot of time thinking about this very question. Now, I cannot speak for the entire company, but I believe it all goes back to the fact that Microsoft was and still is a company focused on software developers. Remember, when Microsoft first started, it built and sold a BASIC interpreter. Later on, the company delivered Visual Studio and many more products. The core mission in the Microsoft culture always has been to enable software developers.

For a while, Windows and Office overshadowed the developer frameworks, losing touch with those core developers, but with the introduction of Azure, the focus has since been reverted back to software developers, and those same developers love open source.

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Linux on Azure—a Strange Place to Find a Penguin

Andrew Fabbro — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 19:57:07 +0000

by Andrew Fabbro

Linux enthusiasts might think the idea of running a Linux virtual machine on Microsoft's Azure service is like finding a penguin sun tanning in the Sahara. Linux in the heart of the Microsoft cloud? Isn't that just wrong on so many levels?

Why would anyone want to run Linux on Microsoft servers? For the hobbyist, I suppose for the same reason people climb Mount Everest: because it's there. For the business user, the prospect of spinning up Linux VMs in Microsoft's fabric offers new options for collocating open-source technologies with existing Microsoft Azure services. For the cloud market in general, more competition is good news for consumers.

The Cloud Marketplace

Virtual machines in the form of virtual private servers (VPSes) have been offered for nearly a decade from a galaxy of providers, using virtualization technologies such as Xen, Virtuozzo/OpenVZ and KVM. These providers subdivide a physical server into multiple small virtual servers. Users typically subscribe on a monthly basis, with an allotment of memory, disk and network bandwidth.

Later vendors, such as Amazon, Rackspace and now Microsoft, offer the same service with a finer-grained commitment. Users can spin up a VM (or a hundred) by the hour, pay for bandwidth by the gigabyte and utilize more advanced features, such as private networks, SAN-like storage features, offloaded database engines and so on.

All of this diversity is good news for end users. In 2002, a VPS with 128MB cost nearly $100/month. In 2006, you could get a VPS with 512MB of RAM for $40/month. Today, such VPSes can be found for less than $5/month in the VPS market or for pennies per hour from cloud providers.

Microsoft Enters the Market

Amazon enjoyed early success with its Elastic Compute Cloud and other vendors, such as Rackspace, soon followed suit. Microsoft originally opted for a different, more complex cloud strategy. Azure was built as a "platform as a service" offering (see the Cloud Flavors sidebar) in which developers could write applications that ran in various roles and talked to Azure APIs. In theory, this allowed developers to concentrate on code and not worry about the abstracted hardware underneath.

In practice, developers were forced to write Azure-centric applications and adoption was slow. Many enterprises with mixed Windows/Linux environments found that hosting their own self-managed servers on Amazon and other cloud environments was more attractive than spending time porting and debugging their applications.

In 2012, Microsoft added "infrastructure as a service" (virtual machines) offerings to its lineup, allowing users to run and administer Windows and Linux virtual machines they directly control.

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