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Gianugo Rabellino, Microsoft’s Senior Director for Open Source Communities, just finished delivering his keynote at OSCON in Portland. As Gianugo is now wandering around the OSCON session and expo floor, I thought it would we useful to give you a quick recap of what he just presented.
During his keynote, Gianugo discussed how both the world and Microsoft are changing, saying that “at Microsoft we continue to evolve our focus to meet the challenging needs on the industry: we are open, more open than you may think.”
Gianugo explained that the frontiers between open source, proprietary and commercial software are becoming more and more of a blur. The point is not about whether you run your IT on an Open Source stack or a commercial stack, the important thing is how you can assemble software components and build solutions on top of them using APIs, protocols and standards. And the reality is that most IT systems are using heterogeneous components, he said.
Looking at the cloud, the blur is even more opaque. What does Open Source or Commercial mean in the cloud?
Gianugo put it this way: “In the cloud, we see just a continuous, uninterrupted shade of grey, which makes me believe it's probably time to upgrade our vision gear. If we do that, we may understand that we have a challenge ahead of us, and it's a big one: we need to define the new cornerstones of openness in the cloud. And we actually gave it a shot on this very same stage one year ago, when we came up with four interoperability elements of a cloud platform: data portability, standards, ease of migration & deployment, and developer choice.”
Finally, Gianugo talked about how Microsoft’s participation in Open Source communities is real, and he used his keynote as an opportunity to announce a few new projects and updates.
Gianugo Rabellino
One way we interact with open source software is by building technical bridges, Gianugo said, giving an example on the virtualization front: announcing support for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 and CentOS 6.0 guest operating systems on Windows Server Hyper-V (which follows this Linux Interoperability announcement at OSBC a few weeks ago. )
On the cloud development front, we are continuing to improve support for open source languages and runtimes, Gianugo said, announcing the availability of a new version of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP, an open source project which is led by Maarten Balliauw from RealDolmen, where Microsoft is providing funding and technical assistance.
Maarten has all the details on the new features and link to the open source code of the SDK. This announcement also includes a set of cloud rules for the popular PHP_CodeSniffer tool that Microsoft has developed to facilitate the transition of existing PHP applications to Windows Azure. The new set of rules is available on Github.
An on demand Webcast of Gianugo’s keynote will soon be available, and I’ll post the link to it here.
Thanks!
Microsoft today signed a collaboration agreement with China Standard Software Corporation (CS2C), the country’s leading domestic Linux operating system provider, to jointly develop, market and sell solutions for the cloud-computing market in China.
The deal will help provide the mixed source infrastructure necessary to facilitate the rapid growth and change taking place across China, where cloud-based infrastructure is budding across cities and provinces.
The primary goal of this agreement, which was announced at a joint event in Beijing today, is to provide public and private cloud solutions to a diverse array of industries through a rich partner ecosystem.
The mixed source solutions stemming from this collaboration will be built on Microsoft’s Hyper-V Open Cloud architecture and will include support to run CS2C NeoKylin Linux Server products.
As Sandy Gupta, the General Manager for Microsoft’s Open Solutions Group, notes in his blog, Microsoft is working with CS2C to bring about a true, open architecture in the area of cloud management and automation for IT organizations throughout China.
“A cornerstone of this agreement is for CS2C-branded Linux servers to run under the Hyper-V Cloud architecture as a first class guest. CS2C and Microsoft will work together to enable CS2C Linux to run well on Hyper-V and be managed through Microsoft System Center,” Gupta says.
Microsoft and CS2C have also pledged to sponsor a joint virtual technology lab in Beijing for solution development and testing of cloud solutions that will allow customers to move to virtualization and a cloud-based IT infrastructure.
The lab will focus on the certification of CS2C NeoKylin Operating System on Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V, creating Microsoft Systems Center management packs for CS2C NeoKylin Operating System application workloads, and incorporating support for CS2C NeoKylin Operating System within the Hyper-V Cloud architecture.
As part of the collaboration, CS2C will also join the Interop Vendor Alliance, an established community of software and hardware vendors that have been working together to enhance interoperability with Microsoft systems.
In addition to establishing market and technology collaboration, the two companies have also signed a customer legal covenant agreement.
In line with Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to Interoperability, Gupta notes that “interoperable Linux and Windows offerings will empower customers to build solutions that will enable them to capitalize on opportunities to expand, grow and achieve the focus necessary to fuel innovation.”
Han Naiping, the president of CS2C, notes that this is an “important opportunity to collaborate with Microsoft to deliver comprehensive, flexible, cloud-based solutions that will serve as a platform for business growth.”
You can read more about this agreement on Sandy Gupta’s blog and in the press release.
I'm heading off to Paris this weekend to participate in the annual Open Source Think Tank and Open World Forum events held in that wonderful city next week.
I'm really looking forward to chatting with all those folk interested in this space, from enthusiasts to developers and end users.
I will be joined at these events by my colleague and Technical Ambassador Craig Kitterman, as well as by Alfonso Castro, our local market interoperability program lead.
We will present technical sessions and participate in a number of panel discussions, ranging from what Open Source, Open Standards and Open Systems mean today to Open Source as an agent of change.
Our participation in these Paris events complements our existing broad engagement with OSS communities, and we look forward to meeting our friends from the PhP, Node.js, Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress.communities as well as to making a lot of new ones.
You can read more about our participation in Paris here, and we look forward to meeting those of you lucky enough to be attending in person.
More good news on Microsoft's commitment to Interoperability in the cloud: last week Sandy Gupta, the General Manager for Microsoft's Open Solutions Group, announced that Windows Server Hyper-V is now an officially supported hypervisor for OpenNebula.
This open source project is working on a prototype for release next month and it will soon be possible for customers to build and manage OpenNebula clouds on a Hyper-V based virtualization platform.
"Windows Server Hyper-V is an enterprise class virtualization platform that is getting rapidly and widely deployed in the industry. Given the highly heterogeneous environments in today’s data centers and clouds, we are seeing enablement of various Linux distributions including SUSE, CentOS, Red Hat, and CS2C on Windows Server Hyper-V, as well as emerging open source cloud projects like OpenStack -- and now OpenNebula," Gupta said in a blog post.
Today Microsoft Open Sourced the reference designs to the .Net Gadgeteer, a rapid prototyping, education/hobbyist kit built on the .NET Micro Framework.
The .Net Gadgeteer team has spent the past few months redesigning and re-implementing the kit to ensure that the architecture will work with the widest variety of processors and support the most diverse set of modules.
The .NET Gadgeteer is based on a set of pluggable modules that remove the need to create specific connections for each electronic component - you only need to plug the modules in. This greatly speeds up the process of building experimental devices and also removes the need for any electronics background to bring your ideas to reality.
In addition to making the hardware development easy, .NET Gadgeteer includes a set of libraries that provide a high level, high productivity development environment so that you can create the intelligence of the device in just a few lines of code.
These libraries are built on the .Net Micro Framework which provides a deep integration with the powerful Microsoft development tools. Now you can develop embedded logic in Visual Studio using C# then deploy the application to the device and debug that application using the rich debugging capabilites of the IDE.
The reference implementation includes the software libraries, which are licensed under Apache 2.0, as well as the designs and specifications for the hardware, which are licensed under the Creative Commons.
Program Unit Manager Colin Miller tells me that the .Net Gadgeteer platform has generated a great deal of enthusiasm among hobbyists and educators as it enables people with a wide range of electronics and programming skills to create an almost limitless array of devices. (Watch this video for more background).
“Our goal is to encourage and support third parties to build kits and modules that all work together to create a rich ecosystem for the user community. This software is still in beta form and we encourage your input on it. We will also aggressively encourage and support vendors interested in evaluating the potential of the platform,” he says.
Microsoft announced today that, with immediate effect, it will support Windows Server2008 R2 Hyper-V running CentOS, a popular Linux distribution for hosters.
"This development enables our hosting partners to consolidate their mixed Windows and Linux infrastructure on Windows Server Hyper-V; reducing cost and complexity, while betting on an enterprise class virtualization platform. I want to thank the Microsoft Open Source Technology Center for the work they have done with the community to make this possible," Sandy Gupta, a general manager in Microsoft's Open Solutions Group, said in a blog post.
Gupta will also be delivering a keynote address at the opening day of the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco today. During the keynote he, along with his colleague Fabio Cunha, will demonstrate the cross-platform architecture of Microsoft’s Private Cloud.
"We will show implementation that supports multiple hypervisors and delivers a platform for the transformation of a heterogeneous IT infrastructure into an automated mixed source Cloud infrastructure. Fabio will show demos of various cross-platform capabilities of System Center Operations Manager, System Center Orchestrator, and also how customers can use a single pane of glass to deploy patches and updates across Windows and Linux Servers," Gupta said.
You can read the full blog post here.
From the floor of the PHP Tek Conference in Chicago, with my colleague Peter Laudati, we’re excited to announce the availability of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP version 3.0. This Open Source SDK gives PHP developers a “speed dial” library to take full advantage of Windows Azure’s coolest features. On top of many improvements and bug fixes for this version (see the list from Maarten Balliauw’s preview), we’re particularly excited about the new service management possibilities and the new logging infrastructure.
Beyond the new features, we also feel that version 3.0 of this SDK marks an important milestone because we’re not only starting to witness real world deployment, but also we’re seeing more people joining the project and contributing. We’ve been talking a lot to Maarten Balliauw from RealDolmen who is the lead developer on this open source project and he also shares the same sentiment: “It’s interesting to see the Windows Azure SDK for PHP mature: people are willing to contribute to it and incorporate their experience with the SDK and the platform.”
The most compute intensive part of Facebook app www.hotelpeeps.com is powered by PHP on Windows Azure
My colleague Todi Pruteanu from Microsoft Romania worked with Lucian Daia and Alexandru Lapusan from Zitec to help them get started with PHP on Windows Azure. The result is impressive. The most compute intensive part of the Hotel Peeps Facebook application is now running on Windows Azure, using the SDK for PHP, as well as SQL Azure. Read the interview of Alexandru to get the details on what and how they did it (you can also check out the case study here). I like this quote from the interview: “HotelPeeps Trends running on the Windows Azure platform is the epitome of interoperability. Some people think that a PHP application running on Microsoft infrastructure is science fiction, but that’s not the case.” Another interesting aspect is also the subsequent contribution by Zitec of an advanced “logging” component to the Windows Azure SDK for PHP. This new component provides the possibility of storing logs from multiple instances in a centralized location, namely Azure Tables.
More contributions from the community
As the SDK gets more widely adopted, there is an exciting trend toward more community involvement. For example, Damien Tournoud from the CommerceGuys who is working on developing the Drupal integration module for Windows Azure, recently contributed a patch fixing bugs related to inconsistencies in URL-encoding of parameters in the HTTP_Client library. As we continue to improve the SDK to ensure great interoperability with popular applications like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla! we look forward to engagement more deeply with those communities to make the experience even better.
New! Windows Azure Sample Kit for PHP
Today we are also announcing the Windows Azure Sample Kit for PHP. It is a new project hosted on github that will be the primary repository for all sample php code / apps that developers can use to learn how to take advantage of the various features of Windows Azure in php. Today we are releasing two samples to the repository: the Guestbook application (example of how to use the Windows Azure storage objects – blobs, queues and tables as well as a simple web/worker pattern) and “Deal of the Day” (more on this one later). We look forward to feedback on the samples and I am also hoping to see some forks and new samples coming from the community!
New features to easily manage auto-scaling of applications on Windows Azure
As I mentioned the version 3.0 of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP includes a new “service management” library, which provides easy ways to monitor the activity of your running instances (Windows Azure web roles & workers roles virtual machines), and to start/stop automatically instances based on usage. Then it becomes easy for you to decide which parameters (CPU, bandwidth, # of connections, etc.) and thresholds to use to scale up and down, and maintain the optimum quality of service for your web applications.
The scenario is simple: let’s say you are running an e-commerce site and you want to run daily promotions to get rid of overstocked items. So you’re going to offer crazy deals every day starting at 8am, each deal being advertised to your subscribers by an email blast. You will have to be ready ready to absorb a major spike in traffic, but the exact time is difficult to predict as the news of the deal may take some time to travel through twitter. When the traffic does materialize, you want the site to run & scale independently – providing service assurance but also minimizing your costs (by shutting down unnecessary capacity as loads go down). This is the scenario for the “Deal of the Day” sample application.
What’s the “Deal of the Day” (DotD) sample app and what to expect?
Deal of the Day (DotD) is a sample application written in PHP to show how to utilize Windows Azure’s scalability features from within PHP. We’ve kept is simple and built it in a way that’s easy to deconstruct and learn from.
As a sample application, DotD did not undergo extensive testing, nor does the code include all the required error catching, security verifications and so on, that an application designed for real production would require. So, do expect glitches. And if you do witness issues, send us a screenshot showing error messages with a description. I’ll get a prize to the first 100 bug trackers!
However, to give you an opportunity to see the sample application working, we’ve decided to deploy a live version on Windows Azure to let you test it for real and give the chance to win actual fun prizes! (and sorry for our friends outside of USA, but prizes can be shipped only to a US address )
Wanna play? Just go this way: http://dealoftheday.cloudapp.net/ Looking for the code, just get it on GitHub here: http://bit.ly/iPddwx
Architecture of the DotD sample app
The DotD sample app is comprised of several pieces which fit together to create the overall experience:
Each of these parts is essential to the performance and scalability of DotD and for more details I invite you to read this introduction article, and then to dig deeper by reading part I (Performance Metrics) and Part II (Role Management) of our “Scaling PHP applications on Windows Azure” series. We will expand the series with additional in depth articles, the next one will be around monitoring the performance of your app.
We look forward to your feedback on the SDK and the Sample Kit. Once again the URL is https://github.com/Interop-Bridges/Windows-Azure-Sample-Kit-4-PHP
Cheers!
Craig Kitterman Twitter: Follow @craigkitterman Web: http://craig.kitterman.net
by anandeep on April 03, 2007 06:49pm
Michael Koziarski (a.k.a) Koz is one of the core group of about 12 people who holds the keys to the code repository for the Rails framework (also known as Ruby on Rails). They’re all listed on the Rails core page with name and mug-shot. (I checked, a guy who looks like the Michael I interviewed has his mug shot on the page!).
According to his bio there “Michael Koziarski (nzkoz) is a software consultant based in Wellington, New Zealand. After a successful stint as an enterprise Java developer, he switched to rails shortly after the first public release. He’s a contributor to The Rails Way and maintains a personal blog.” That’s as good a intro as any so we thought we wouldn’t improve on it!
Michael was invited to the Microsoft Technical Summit and I was able to spend some really entertaining and educational time with him. I even showed him the lab! I think he may have enjoyed his time here as he wrote about us in a blog entry.
I enjoyed talking to him – and he stayed to talk to us about Rails, the dev process and other stuff despite being very close to missing his flight!
Anandeep
by Bryan Kirschner on May 20, 2007 07:53pm
I just read Bill and Sam’s “Business as Usual” post. It made me think about the fact Port 25 was established in part to apply the idea that “transparency increases trust” to the work we do with the lab. So I’m sitting down to do a blog entry that’s a bit longer than usual, but will provide transparency about why “business as usual” for me. I previously blogged about a project we were starting to look at usability, human-computer interaction (HCI) and design rationale in open source development. I want to share how that came about and what I work on every day, over a period of about 12 months.
Part 1: Andrew Ko at Carnegie-Mellon (hi, Andrew) and folks from Microsoft Research (you rock, HIP) have done fascinating work on “Information Needs in Collocated Development Teams:” (emphasis added):
[In] a two-month field study of software developers at Microsoft. We took a broad look, observing 17 groups across the corporation, focusing on three specific questions: What information do software developers’ seek? Where do developers find this information? What inhibits the acquisition of such information? In our observations, we found several needs. The most difficult to satisfy were design questions: for example, developers needed to know the intent behind code already written and code yet to be written.
[In] a two-month field study of software developers at Microsoft. We took a broad look, observing 17 groups across the corporation, focusing on three specific questions:
What information do software developers’ seek? Where do developers find this information? What inhibits the acquisition of such information?
In our observations, we found several needs. The most difficult to satisfy were design questions: for example, developers needed to know the intent behind code already written and code yet to be written.
Code itself was a poor conductor—let’s call it bad currency, for reasons that will become apparent later—for transmission of design knowledge. From the MSR paper:
code did not look like design; intent could rarely be inferred from code; programming languages only allowed a single, structural perspective on code, yet there were many other perspectives on which developers reasoned about code
As a result, “the knowledge was primarily stored in the minds of developers. Consequently, developers relied on each other for design knowledge.” A common way to do this was face-to-face contact. Another way to do this was through email.
Part 2: Flore Barcellini (hi, Flore) is a research at INRIA (France) who has done a fascinating analysis of “Thematic Coherence and Quotation Practices in OSS Design-Oriented Online Discussions.” The implication is that traversing threads may be a lot more “lossy” than one might think because the “tree” you can build following transmission of knowledge using quotes can differ (from the abstract):
We show how quotation practices can be used to locate design relevant data in discussion archives. OSS developers use quotation as a mechanism to maintain the discursive context. To retrace the thematic coherence in the online discussions of a major OSS project, Python, we follow how messages are linked through quotation practices. We compare our quotation-based analysis with a more conventional analysis: a thread-based of the reply-to links between messages. The advantages of a quotation-based analysis over a thread-based analysis are outlined.
All but a few open source projects do not receive investment from vendors and do not have material revenue streams—for these “community-driven” projects, face-to-face contact would obviously be prohibitively expensive. So in reliance on code and email to transmit design knowledge, they would seem to be dependent on a lossy medium (code-as-currency) and a lossy mechanism (mail threads).
Part 3: David Nichols and Michael Twidale (hi, Michael) have done research identifying usability & HCI challenges in open source development, thoughtfully articulating some of the issues and possible ways to evolve distributed development.
Part 4: I was left with the impression this is a scenario that is really not good for community-driven OSS—and, by implication, for any resource-constrained distributed development process (something applicable to end-user developers collaborating online, and perhaps small ISVs, communities large in both number and importance to Microsoft’s business).
After reaching this conclusion I contacted the Codeplex team (meet the team) to talk about Microsoft taking a role in developing new functionality that might help this scenario. But first we needed to establish a research program to figure out whether this was a good path to go down, and what to do. That led to contact with Jack Carroll, Paula Bach, and the current project.
The first public session we held on this was a special interest group (Usability and Free / Libre / Open Source Software) at the recent CHI 2007 conference. Jack, Paula, and I moderated. I’ll let notes mostly from Paula sum up one aspect of a great discussion that gave me ideas I’d never thought of before:
About 40 people (1/3 to 1/ 2 of whom were involved in open source projects as contributors or researchers) attended the CHI Special Interest Group (SIG) on Usability and Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS). The group raised many issues including the “code as currency” issue. In essence, if “code is the only currency’ can there be a “benevolent HCI dictator?” The currency problem arises when HCI people who don’t write code work on FLOSS projects, potentially preventing the common mechanism of the “benevolent dictator” who can arbitrate conflicts over coding from emerging in the design and HCI domain. An interesting benevolent HCI dictator experiment would be to have HCI people design and initiate an open source project (it could even be a rapid prototyping tool that could be used as currency between FLOSS HCI people and developers) and have developers work on the project with an HCI person as the leader. This would be interesting in terms of social dynamics and to see who prevails as the benevolent dictator: would the HCI person remain or would a developer move into the leadership position once code writing began?
This is what we do every day. I hope this provides a bit of a view over time into our daily work to be center of excellence for (1) understanding and (2) finding opportunity with open source: ways for Microsoft and open source to “grow together.”
(Speaking of growing together, if you were one of the companies invited to the Microsoft Open Source ISV Forum before OSBC, I hope to see you there.)
by Bryan Kirschner on June 04, 2007 03:28pm
OSBC made me think. There were some simple highlights (like introducing myself and being recognzied as “a Port 25 blogger”…my 1.5 minutes of fame). And certainly a lowlight was the concern many people expressed around whether Microsoft’s open source strategy has changed (no, it hasn’t, another reason why going to OSBC and having those conversations is important).
But what really started me thinking was the experience of being at the Microsoft Open Source ISV Forum held the day before. Simply and accurately described as an event specifically tailored to open source companies on “How to be profitable on the Microsoft platform,” it was attended by—I don’t have the exact count handy—folks from give or take 50 companies. They represented an incredibly diverse set of approaches to building a business (and cultivating a community) around open source. Fast forward later during OSBC to a long presentation Eben Moglen gave called “Copyleft Business Models: Why it’s Good Not to Be Your Competitor’s Free Lunch.”
These two things drew a broad connection: many different parties, each, in their own ways, “trying to balance being a good community citizen with getting paid” (appropriately enough, a quote from OSBC’s founder Matt Asay)—whether your pay is a financial transaction or non-financial contribution.
The companies who came to the Forum literally did get a free lunch—but there’s a more important point. Microsoft’s business strategy, overall, not specific to open source, is to be generative: with 750,000 partners (including ISVs, OEMs, systems integrators and consultants and so on), 96% of Microsoft’s revenue is indirect (meaning somebody among those 750,000 partners gets paid before Microsoft does).
Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain described the concept I am borrowing-- Zittrain describes “generative” this way (emphasis added):
The much-touted differences between free and proprietary PC Oss may not capture what is most important to the Internet’s future. Proprietary systems can remain “open,” as many do, by permitting unaffiliated third parties to write superseding programs and permitting PC owners to install these programs without requiring any gatekeeping by the OS provider. In this sense, debates about the future of our PC experience should focus less on such common battles as Linux versus Microsoft Windows, as both are “open” under this definition, and more on generative versus nongenerative: understanding which platforms will remain open to third-party innovation and which will not.
Sometimes this means what you can see (free as in open code - simple example WIX), sometimes what you can do (free as in beer SDKs). But this commitment (or, you could even say, dependency on) generativity means there is a risk of serving a competitor more than a literal free lunch: partner programs like the one offered at the Forum are set up so any ISV who meets the requirements can get business and technical assistance from Microsoft. Whether or not your business is built around software that competes with Microsoft products isn’t a criterion: from Oracle to SugarCRM ISVs that partner with Microsoft to build applications on Windows also compete with other Microsoft products. Nor is what type of development, business model, or licensing approach you have chosen. You really can’t have the benefits of being “generative” without accepting these conditions. Conversely, you obviously can be generative while competing to some degree with those same partners, whether with SQL Server or Dynamics.
This is really a point I wish I could go back to every person from an open-source based company I talked to about “Microsoft’s open source strategy” and re-reemphasize. From an ISV or partner you’re an “equal citizen” as a potential partner. That commitment (or dependency on) generativity is one that predates the popularity of open source in the broad market and remains a core component of Microsoft’s business success.
That’s “business as usual” as well.
(I would be remiss if I did not mention the Forum without thanking our speakers: Stephen O’Grady from Redmonk; Andrew Aitken from Olliance; John Roberts from Sugar CRM; and Marc Lind from Aras. In addition, the awesome VC Panel members were informative & thought provoking : Larry Augustin, Peter Sonsini, Philippe Cases, Nicolas Kardas, Kim Polese. Thanks all for a great day.)
by billhilf on June 07, 2007 04:24pm
We recently announced the addition of IIS7 to the Server Core installation of Windows Server 2008 (formerly known as Longhorn Server). Server Core is an important evolution of our server product and will include a variety of roles, such as print server, media services, Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, and now IIS7 for Web serving. All of these will be able to run in a lightweight, low footprint modes – a server core installation requires about 1GB of physical disk space to install and approximately 2 GB for operations post-install. This means it’s Windows Server but with just the bits you need to run a specific type of server role – which means less disk, less memory, lower attack surface, less stuff to manage, patch, etc. There are also a variety of optional features you can add to server core, such as the subsystem for Unix applications, Bitlocker drive encryption, failover cluster, and others. Of course, Windows Server 2008 can still run as a full featured general purpose server operating system as well. Sam and Hank did an interview with Iain McDonald about Server Core last September, you can see that interview here.
I’ve built and run many Web server farms over that past years and having the ability to roll out small footprint, role-based server configurations is something I found to be an important architectural advantage. In the past, I used Apache on Linux/BSDs to build customized servers. Certainly you can still do this today. What I think is exciting about this announcement of IIS7 on Windows Server 2008 Server Core is that it shows the full spectrum of the Windows Server 2008 capabilities, from very modular, low footprint Web serving to the all-singing all-dancing full featured server.
Additionally, as you may have read here before, we’ve been working hard with the Zend on making PHP run great on Windows Server. With the new FastCGI support (which is now integrated with IIS7 in beta 3), PHP runs extremely well on Server Core. So if you need a tier of streamlined front-end PHP Web servers that require minimal system resources and just the needed bits for doing the job? Now you will be able do this with Windows Server 2008. And those systems can be managed, secured, updated, authenticated, etc. just like any other Windows server machine.
I think this all brings more choice to developers and system administrators. And you can expect this will be something we continue to evolve, adding more customization scenarios and support of other technologies, including .NET. Check out Bill Staple’s blog on this as well – his team is doing all the IIS work. You test drive Windows Server 2008 here or download the latest beta here. The FastCGI Technology Preview can be found here.
Unrelated and Personal (non-work related) tidbit:
Talking about server core and IIS7 reminded me of this quote: “The future you have tomorrow won’t be the same future you had yesterday” from Chuck Palahniuk’s latest book Rant. I think it’s his best so far -I just finished this on my last trip. If you like Chuck, watch this lecture – the ‘little software story’ advice at the end is priceless and motivational for aspiring writers.
by Sam Ramji on June 08, 2007 05:34pm
Most of Port 25’s readers are aware of my commitment to interoperability between Microsoft and Linux, as exemplified in the OSSL’s work on IPsec and now the three-sided virtualization, identity, and systems management work with Novell. I’m proud to announce a leader at Microsoft who has the sole purpose of bringing Windows and Linux technologies together: Tom Hanrahan. Tom will join as the Director of Linux Interoperability, and will head our Linux/Windows interoperability work, including leadership of the Microsoft/Novell Interoperability Lab. This development lab will undertake much of the engineering work involved in the multi-year technical partnership. Among other things, Tom has much to teach us on “developing in the open” – how to work in a transparent way with a broad engineering community. Tom brings 30 years of engineering, management and community development experience to this effort – and the larger Microsoft community. Prior to joining Microsoft, Tom was the Director of Engineering at the Linux Foundation where he was responsible for managing a variety of technical initiatives. Earlier in his career, Tom led IBM’s Linux Technology Center in Portland, and spent 11 years at Sequent Computer Systems in the early days of SMP (symmetric multiprocessing). It is excellent to have Tom on board, and he is already making an impact. His outstanding history of Linux engineering will greatly contribute to our focus on interoperability. You can also expect to see some of Tom’s work (and thoughts) show up on Port 25.
Please join me in welcoming Tom Hanrahan.
by billhilf on June 25, 2007 05:14pm
Things I’ve been collecting, with no rhyme or reason connecting them…
All for now.
-Bill
by anandeep on August 17, 2007 01:35pm
My overall impression was that OSCON was lower key than last year. There seemed to be fewer booths in the Exhibition floor and less palpable excitement in the venue. A lot of people were complaining about the quality of the tutorials and the talks. Or it may just be that this was my second time around attending OSCON and it didn’t have the same quality of excitement for me compared to the very first time!
Microsoft’s name was on the bag that they gave us. That was good to see. Also Microsoft’s name was on the marquee as a diamond sponsor. The other sponsors were all big names. Intel was a diamond sponsor as was Zimki. Zimki? Wait a minute, Zimki isn’t a big name! How did an open source web development platform company spend so much money? According to their web site “Zimki is Fotango's flagship product, a JavaScript web application development platform that enables developers and businesses to build and deploy web apps quickly without the need for tools, equipment or hosting. With no set-up fees and subscription charges,users simply pay for the computing resources that they consume on a utility basis.” Their blog also states that they were holding back their plans to roll out Zimki at OSCON . So a small company spent all this money and had no presence at OSCON. Shades of the dot com boom. Hopefully open source web development platforms are not today’s dot coms!
I attended two keynotes (that I remembered an hour after I attended them) – one involved Eben Moglen, the lawyer dude for the FSF, tearing into Tim O’Reilly. Tim O’Reilly was asking Eben questions about whether GPL V3 gave Google a free ride. Eben went into how he wanted to protect freedom and how the Open Source people had “wasted ten years” not making “freedom” the issue. But as persuasive and articulate as Eben is, I think he left the feeling with the audience that the FSF had given in to Google to get GPL V3 passed. Eben even used the words “diplomacy” to describe the process of building GPL V3.
Some dramatic moments such as Eben pointing to Tim and then to the sign behind him and saying,” Take down that sign with YOUR name on it and put “Freedom” there instead”. Tim even went to say to him – “I will ignore the personal attacks”. To which Eben said – “This is not a personal attack, it’s an invitation to diplomacy”. Wow! I could have watched a musical and not had so much drama.
Don’t get me wrong, I admire the FSF’s devotion to its cause. They have been consistently practicing what they preach. I am glad that there are people like them to keep even big companies like Microsoft honest. But I feel let down with their inconsistency with respect to Google.
The other keynote that I enjoyed was Bill Hilf. Bill is our GM, and we know all the stuff he said in speech. We try not to say one thing and practice another (surprise, surprise!). But he said it all so clearly, and so well in front of a largely skeptical audience. It was a masterful and engaging performance. Even when ambushed by Nat Torkington with questions that were not on the agenda, he didn’t lose his verve and kept on emphasizing what we do instead of what we say. It feels great to have a official place in the Microsoft firmament @ www.microsoft.com/opensource . Wait! Or was it nice to be the exclusive open source guys in such a big company? (From a purely selfish point of view)
I attended a few talks. One was Sam Ramji’s talk about our Interop efforts in virtualization, identity and management. To tell you the truth, I went because Sam is my boss. But I stayed because he did a great job of simplifying and presenting the information. I learnt and reinforced a ton about virtualization and the Interop challenges around it. I now have a firm grasp on the subject – not isolated chunks of information unconnected to each other. Ok Sam, when are you doing a talk on High Performance Computing? J
The other significant talk I attended was about Hadoop. Hadoop is an open source software platform that lets one easily write and run applications that process vast amounts of data. Or basically it implements Google’s MapReduce. According to Google’s original paper on MapReduce - “Programs written in the MapReduce style are automatically parallelized and executed on a large cluster of commodity machines. The run-time system takes care of the details of partitioning the input data, scheduling the program's execution across a set of machines, handling machine failures, and managing the required inter-machine communication. This allows programmers without any experience with parallel and distributed systems to easily utilize the resources of a large distributed system”.
Hadoop has been created by Doug Cutting, the creator of Lucene and Nutch. In order for him to do MapReduce effectively he had to do a “Google File System (GFS)” like system called “Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS)”. HDFS was originally built as infrastructure for the Apache Nutch web search engine project.
Now, Yahoo is using Hadoop and HDFS for its back end. There is now an open source implementation of Google’s Open Source based proprietary stuff. If the community get’s behind it, it may be that the truly open source stuff may outshine the open source but proprietary stuff. Makes your head spin.
Oh, and why the name Hadoop? Doug Cutting’s son’s favorite elephant was named Hadoop. A name that came from the son’s imagination. I love Open Source!
by Bryan Kirschner on August 29, 2007 01:09am
When I describe my job as “helping Microsoft and open source to grow together,” I get a broad range of reactions from people outside and inside of Microsoft. These reactions have included sentiments along the lines of “that must be tough,” or “you must be a glutton for punishment” on occasion.
After wrapping up a fairly momentous year* culminating in OSCON (see this and this), I thought the time was right to put some big-picture context around how I feel about my job.
The year 1995 was when we saw the first official public release (0.6.2) of the Apache server, and MySQL AB was founded.
The world was two years shy of the Debian Software Guidelines and three years away from the articulation of the Open Source Definition (OSD) they inspired.
The Open Source Technology Group (OSTG)—by virtue of operating both Sourceforge and Freshmeat today’s largest hoster of public open source project--was about to be founded.
We were at the very beginning of the growth of open source into a significant, enduring part of the IT environment.
So what’s this graph below showing over the course of (roughly) 1995 through 2007?
It’s showing Microsoft’s reported fiscal year revenue, which grew to $51.122B USD in 2007 from $6.075B in 1995 (you can reproduce it with data from here.)
During most of this time, we didn’t have Codeplex. We didn’t have licenses submitted to the OSI. We didn’t have Port 25. We didn’t have Bill Hilf, or Sam Ramji, or the rest of the OSS lab. And we didn’t have http://microsoft.com/opensource.
And Microsoft and open source did grow, together—coincidentally. In retrospect, this is not surprising. Microsoft technologies supported an ecosystem of passionate developers and an entrepreneurial individuals and companies and tens of millions of end-user programmers and end-users providing peer-to-peer assistance sharing knowledge—and code—with each other.
And we had many people at Microsoft working on (to highlight some of my current favorites) the research and development and product management path to technologies like Silverlight and XNA and Photosynth.
Now we have all those things—plus the opportunity to think every day about the “growing together” that has happened coincidentally from (say) 1995 until July 2007—and how we might work together with others to make it that much more (--food for thought: MySQL’s Community VP Kaj Arno blogged about the WAMP stack just after OSCON here).
There are reasons why my job can be challenging sometimes—but the slightest concern that Microsoft and open source don’t have opportunities to “grow together” by design faster and farther than they have (largely)** “by accident” over the last 10 plus years isn’t among them.
The “official” t-shirt of the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft says “Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft: Reports of Snowballs Seen in Hell.” This year was another step forward to replacing that slogan with “Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft: Of Course.” Then I’ll get the answer I give back to people when I describe my job: not tough. Cool.
*I have internalized a July-to-June fiscal year calendar. I attribute this to the fact that my wife works in education, so summer forms an annual breakpoint for her, as well as to the fact I worked in Finance during a point in my life when I think I mistook a love of math for an affinity for pain.
**There’s more than enough material for, and reason to do, a separate post about some of the individual “pioneers” at Microsoft, without whom we would not have the resources we have in place today here at Microsoft.