Microsoft reveals its Linux distribution for Azure

It is running Linux workloads to make the Azure cloud. Facebook started designing its own data center switches recently. Bill Laing, corporate vice president for the Cloud and Enterprise Division at Microsoft, and Kushagra Vaid, its general manager of server engineering, had a wide-ranging conversation about all kinds of things. But Microsoft has revealed that its new Azure Cloud Switch software for networking devices is built on a Linux foundation.

So it was logical to expect that Microsoft was, in fact, hacking together its own network operating system.

In addition to debugging their in-house built software, Microsoft uses the Azure Cloud Switch Linux-based operating system to share software stacks across different hardware from various switch vendors, simply by using the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) specification, which can be used for programming network switching application-specific integrated circuits.

“As such, Redmond wasn’t able to find SDN code to fit its needs and ACS “… focuses on feature development based on Microsoft priorities” and “allows us to debug, fix, and test software bugs much faster.

“Before SAI, the underlying complexity of the hardware, with its strict coupling of protocol stack software, denied us the freedom to choose the best combination of hardware and software for our networking needs”. Following its debut at the OCP summit in March this year, the second demonstration of ACS was held at SIGCOMM in August.

“We believe this approach of disaggregating the switch software from the switch hardware will continue to be a growing trend in the networking industry and we would like to contribute our insights and experiences of this journey starting here”, he said. The Microsoft switch OS is also modular, she says, which makes it easier to add features to it without impacting the entire OS software stack.

Company officials provided information about that operating system, known as Azure Cloud Switch (ACS), in a September 17 blog post. One possibility: ACS will be offered to users as a way to build a more Azure-like environment within their data centers – much as Microsoft is planning to do with Azure Service Fabric. All of this rides on top of the SAI layer, which in turn runs on top of the ASICs.

Ballmer and Bill Gates even recorded a freakish parody of “The Matrix” where they took potshots at Linux, claiming it was too hard for non-technical people to use (which wasn’t exactly wrong).