You don’t go building a table with only a Hammer, do you? You need a diverse set of tools and materials to make any kind of project, be it furniture or advanced infrastructure. We’ve come to recognize this and have been working hard to ensure you have an awesome heterogeneous experience both on premises and in Azure.
To be completely honest, most of my professional career has been in the Windows world with the last 10 ish years working AT Microsoft. I’ve supported projects that included Linux or OSS tech/apps here and there – generally involving whatever the developer / infrastructure folks liked to use and were comfortable working with at the time. I am a big believer in the philosophy of “If you work in the IT space, you should keep your options open and work with as many technologies as you can”.
I have to update the numbers on this slide constantly when talking about Azure. The one square that gets a lot of attention is the Linux one. Approximately 20% of Azure IaaS workloads are running on Linux which is able to take advantage of all of the infrastructure and capabilities Azure has to offer – just like Windows VMS. If your on-premises environment isn’t an “All Windows” shop – DON’T WORRY… Microsoft Azure is ready and waiting for your heterogeneous Hybrid datacenter.
If you are looking for information about how to work with Azure and deploy Linux and OSS workloads on our cloud platform – the first place you will probably look is to your search engine of choice. You are not alone. I was chatting with a documentation writer on our Azure team who mentioned while most enterprises rely on support contracts to gain access to resources and information when working on projects, Open Source folks tend to rely on community posts, support forums and online documentation when things go south. We weren’t doing a great job with keeping up with all the updates and changes in a timely fashion, especially with our Linux and OSS docs. It was getting so bad that people were thinking we didn’t care.
Well – that is starting to change.
We recently announced a change to our documentation portal- opening it up for ANYONE to contribute, correct or author their own docs that will be found on Azure.com. All you need is a GitHub account, some guidance on how to contribute and know where our repository is found. I recently shot a video during an internal Hack-A-Doc event where some folks from the Azure Virtual Machine team were participating in a mass GitHub and documentation process training. We are serious about wanting help to make this experience better – have a look at the video below:
As you can see, all of our investments in our cloud services is available equally to both Microsoft and Linux/OSS operating systems. We’re getting our act together when it comes to documentation. I’ll be doing my part here by writing posts that include both Microsoft and Non Microsoft technologies – running on Azure.
When you are ready to run your heterogeneous on-premises workloads in a hybrid environment, we’re ready to support your efforts whole heartedly.