Microsoft, Red Hat in cross-platform container and .Net cuddle Red Hat and Microsoft have extended their partnership with a containerised cross-cloud cuddle. The deal will see: Red Hat allow Windows Server containers to run on its Kubernetes-powered OpenShift container platform Microsoft’s Azure cloud run OpenShift Dedicated, The two team to get SQL Server running on Red Hat …
We started porting our system from .NET Core 4.6 to .NET Core 2 yesterday. We figured there was no harm in making sure our apps work on Windows Server, Linux and specifically in Raspberry Pi.
I think you see it as a battle of Microsoft vs. Not Microsoft. I developed on Linux for a decade and eventually, due to lack of alternatives, moved from Qt on Linux to C# and .NET on Windows because unless I was developing an OS (which I had been doing for a long time), I wanted a real programming language and a real alternative to Qt.
See if you're making a web app, there are a thousand options. In fact, since I started typing this comment, two new options probably were added to Github. And most of them are just plain aweful. Angular 4 with Typescript is very nice, and so are a few others. But even the best ones are very much work in progress.
On the other hand, if you're programming a back end, there is .NET, Java, Node and Python.
I don't use Java because their entire infrastructure is outrageously heavy. Doing anything useful generally requires Tomcat which is just a massive disaster in the making. It makes things easy, but what should use megabytes uses gigabytes, or thousands of hours to optimize.
I don't use Node because while I think it may be the best option... and Typescript is nice, all libraries are written by people who seem to have no interest in uniformity and as such, every module you use takes a month to code review and document before use.
Python is the language of absolutely all languages and can do tens of thousands of things you never knew you wanted to do. But again, the community contributed libraries lack almost any form of quality control. You're locked into a single language, which means that when Python loses its excitement, everything will have to be rewritten. (See the mass migration from Python to Node... no transition path)
Then there's .NET. C# isn't as versatile as Python (nothing is). But when you code against .NET Core, it runs pretty much anywhere. Has performance close to Node than Python. All code written for one language works with all languages on the platform. Documentation standards are high. The main infrastructure has already been reviewed for FIPS-140. There are clear support channels. Apps can be extremely light. Libraries are often optimized. It supports most modern development paradigms. It's completely open. The development team is responsive.
Basically, .NET scores better than average in every category except that it was made by Microsoft.
So... I appreciate that you don't like it. And I am glad people like you are out there using the alternatives which makes sure there are other choices for people like me. But for those of us with no real political bias towards tools, we are all pretty happy that .NET Core 2 has made cross platform realistic.
Maybe at some point your skills and knowledge will help me solve one of my problems and I look forward to thanking you. Yesterday, I sent dinner (pizza and cola) to a guy and his family in England for helping me on a Slack channel. :)
"Basically, .NET scores better than average in every category except that it was made by Microsoft."
Sorry. but no. ".NOT" and C-Pound score LOWER than WHALE CRAP on every scale I can think of.
NOTE: if you code for wxWidgets, you get a cross-platform toolkit that is a lot like MFC. I suggest using THAT. And forget C-pound and ".NOT". Make your applications run WITHOUT that monolithic dead-man strapped to your back. And static link while you're at it. your customers and support techs will thank you.
The Red Hat press release makes it pretty clear that this is about running Red Hat on Azure together with Red Hat Linux in your data centre.
So the thrust if it would seem to be to:
1) Take your legacy Dotnet server applications and port them into container format on Windows.
2) Once you've got that running, port the containers to Red Hat Linux, using the matching Red Hat packaged versions of MS SQL Server and Dotnet Core.
3) Move the combination to Azure running on Red Hat Linux.
4) Combined support is provided jointly by Red Hat and Microsoft.
Microsoft customers aren't going to just bin their legacy Dotnet applications tomorrow any more than IBM mainframe customers are going to bin their Cobol programs. There's money to be made in supporting legacy applications. In this case Red Hat gets the support revenue and Microsoft gets another Azure customer.
The Windows OS division of Microsoft may seem to be getting the short end of the stick on this, but it's been pretty clear for a while now that Microsoft is willing to sacrifice them if that helps build a new future for the company as a whole as a "cloud" provider.
Note to Windows sys admins: start learning about Linux, containers, and "cloud".
Speaking as an avid Linux enthusiast and professional, I think this is great. Sometimes you have to suck it up and use the right tool for the job, be that Ubuntu, Centos or Server 2016. A lot more can be accomplished when we work together and this collaboration between Red Hat and Microsoft is no exception. This will almost certainly help some sysadmins out there rationalise their mixed environments, which can't be a bad thing.
I appreciate MS isn't quite the same as MS of old, and I do understand this might well be good for both parties and customers alike. But historically, partnering with MS hasn't turned out well for the partner that isn't MS... so I'm wondering what Redhat hope will come out of this?
Or is it Redhat shareholders hoping that eventually Redhat will be bought out?
Or maybe I'm just being cynical?! :D
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