Late last week, hell had apparently frozen over with the news that Microsoft had developed a Linux distribution of its own. The work was done as part of the company's Azure cloud platform, which uses Linux-based network switches as part of its software-defined networking infrastructure.
While the software is real, Microsoft isn't characterizing it as a Linux distribution, telling us that it's an internal project. That's an important distinction, and we suspect that we're not going to see a Microsoft Linux any time soon.
The Open Compute Project (OCP), of which Microsoft is a member, is an industry group that is working together to define hardware and software standards for data center equipment. This includes designs for high density compute nodes, storage, and networking equipment. One part that Microsoft has been working on is network hardware, in particular software-defined networking (SDN). SDN adds a layer of software-based programmability, configuration, and centralized management to hardware that is traditionally awkward to manage. Traditional network switches, even managed ones, aren't designed to enable new policies—alterations to quality-of-service or VLANs, say—to be deployed to hundreds or thousands of devices simultaneously. And to the extent that such capabilities are present, they vary from vendor to vendor.
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