Microsoft Loves Linux

Where does Microsoft plan on making money in the next few years? It won’t be as much from
selling desktop operating systems. Microsoft are continuing to roll with the fact that it’s too
expensive for one organisation to write software. Software needs to be open source, or it can’t
compete.

So instead, Microsoft are expecting to make money via Azure. What will be offered from Azure
will be some traditional products like Office 365, but the bulk of offerings will be from
Services. Until recently, buying an Azure Service would have meant you rented a Virtual
Machine running an entire OS on Azure. In the last couple of years, big, heavy VMs have been
replaced with fast, lightweight Containers. Containers don’t run an entire OS, they just run the
service you require. They are therefore cheaper and faster than VMs, and feed directly into the
modern world of offering Micro Services and using DevOps.

So will Microsoft offer only it’s own version of Containers? Not a chance, as this would be too
limiting. Instead Azure now runs the standard Linux container – Docker.

As of Oct 2017, Microsoft are saying that 40% of Azure VMs are Linux, and 60% of Azure
Marketplace images are Linux-based. However, now that Azure has Docker (new in 2017),
this figure is set to continue rising rapidly. In fact, a bit of Azure *is* a version of BSD Linux.
Azure Cloud Switch is a Linux-based operating system for datacenter switches.

Which all means that Microsoft Administrators have a need to learn significant amounts of
Linux in order to run their servers.
.NET Developers
Who else is going to have to get happy with Linux? Microsoft developers. If a developer writes
some C# code using .NET 4.x, the only platform it will run on is Microsoft. Which means it
will run on Azure, using a funny old Windows VM. But it won’t run on a Linux Container.
Plus it won’t run on any Apple products (iPhones, iPads etc) or Android devices. Both Apple
and Android run on guess what? Linux. So if you want to write apps that run as services, using
Azure containers, and run on any device, you’re going to have to use .NET Core, and learn a
bit of Linux along the way.

When you create a Core app in Visual Studio, you’ll be offered the chance to compile your app
for Linux, eg:

Then when you run your app, it will be hosted by Docker, not IIS or IIS Express, eg:
Other Linux Tools Developers Need
As a C# developer, you’ve been used to using Microsoft tools like Nuget to find and download
software. Why on earth would Microsoft continue to update Nuget, when there’s a perfectly
good set of alternatives available in the open source community? .NET developers will now
need to learn all the Linux tools such as Bower, npm and Grunt. These will sometimes have
nice Visual Studio mouse-driven front ends, but often, .NET developers will have to run these
tools from the command line, just like on a Linux machine.
Linux as an App
To help support all this Linux activity, there are now several versions of Linux that you can
download and run as apps on your Microsoft machines. You just go to the usual Microsoft App
Store, download a Linux distro, and run it as an app from your desktop, eg:

After installation, it becomes just another app, eg:

After you launch your Linux distro, you can go ahead and install loads of standard Linux
programs. Or you can simply use it to look after your Microsoft file system, eg:

Currently, you can download Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, SLES, Kali or Debian GNU, with more
distros planned for the future.
Windows Subsystem for Linux
In order to get Docker and Linux working on your Microsoft machine, you’ll need to activate
a new Microsoft product called “Windows Subsystem for Linux” (WSL)
Docker for Windows
Download and install Docker for Windows, and you can have a little blue whale on your
desktop, eg:

Typically, you’ll configure Docker to start automatically on log in. Once started, the Docker
whale will appear in your Taskbar Notification Area. Open it up, and you can configure
Docker, eg:
SQL Server on Linux
Who else might need some Linux skills? Well, SQL Server can now run on Linux, or can be
installed in a Docker container. The official Docker image is based on Ubuntu. By July 2017,
the SQL Server Docker container had already been pulled over a million times, underlining
that there’s significant interest in this technology. So all you SQL Server administrators might
need to brush up your Linux too.

Ethical Hacking
Every organisation needs to employ people with good security skills, to make sure their internal
data is not easily compromised. To this end, you’ll need to employ a little ethical hacking, and
conduct Penetration Tests on your networks. What’s the operating system of choice for
Penetration Testing? Linux, of course – generally Kali or Parrot. You can just about get by on
these machines with no Linux knowledge, but “just about get by” is not a phrase you want to
see in the same sentence as “Network Security”.

Why Take a Linux Course?

Linux is predominantly command-line driven, with awkward and often obscure commands.
Consequently, it’s super-easy to make mistakes. Quanta Linux courses will teach you what you
need to know to avoid mistakes and learn to love Linux. Our Linux courses are always
delivered on a fully up-to-date version of Linux (usually CentOS), but also always cover the
differences between the major Linux distros (Red Hat Enterprise RHEL, Fedora, Debian,
Ubuntu, Kali, Mint, SUSE etc)