Obligatory Joke [LWN.net]

Obligatory Joke

Posted Jan 10, 2025 19:24 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
In reply to: Obligatory Joke by anton
Parent article: Some things to expect in 2025

Aside from the long tail of compatibility that they want to support to keep existing business, I believe they also use the Windows kernel as the basis for Azure, so they might see it as a competitive advantage against Amazon, VMware, etc. to have their own kernel hackers and their own customization. The cost of changing might not be something they can recoup given they seem to be in a sustainable state now when it comes to base OS kernel support. Whether Exchange, SharePoint or the Azure management plane are a steaming pile or not is unrelated to the quality and brand of the underlying kernel.

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Obligatory Joke

Posted Jan 10, 2025 20:23 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

> I believe they also use the Windows kernel as the basis for Azure

As I understand, most of the networking-level hardware in Azure actually runs Linux ( https://www.wired.com/2015/09/microsoft-using-linux-run-c... ).

As for the hypervisor, the current generation of AWS products uses custom hardware to completely decouple the hypervisor from the underlying guest OS. So the type of a kernel that runs on this hardware is not really that important, in the grand scheme of things.

Obligatory Joke

Posted Jan 11, 2025 1:35 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

Yeah, pretty much all datacenter networking hardware runs Linux now, AFAICT.

I was thinking of the hypervisor, as you said AWS has their own in-house thing, so did VMware and effectively, so does MS.