Pull the other one!
Microsoft has changed? Horseshit! The market has changed and Microsoft are desperately waddling along behind after it. What's happened now is that a modicum of competition in platforms has been introduced and Microsoft as well as every other proprietary legacy vendor are forced to react to something they never expected to see happen.
Microsoft loves Linux? It's more like they know that outside of Microsoft's own narrow circle "cloud" is pretty synonymous with "Linux". If you look at what is happening in the software development world, everything "cloud" that matters runs on Linux. Everybody except Microsoft is targeting to run on Linux. If Microsoft's Azure cloud doesn't offer Linux in a major way, then they can pretty much write off being considered a serious player in the cloud business.
Microsoft working with Docker in nothing new. Microsoft has been lobbying (and even paying sometimes) open source web oriented platform developers to port their software to Windows. In many cases, the software theoretically ran on Windows, but always as an afterthought. There would be Window specific bugs that languished in bug trackers, installing on Windows was an absolute pain, and the Windows oriented support community was non-existent. Meanwhile on Linux, it was always just "apt-get whatever" to install and get running in seconds, and there was loads of information and help available to get and keep things going. Microsoft saw all the "web 2.0" stuff almost exclusively going to Linux, leaving only legacy workloads for Microsoft. The same sort of rational is going into their work with Docker.
"You don't want to get locked in too much to a particular vendor, strategy, technology, whatever," (Microsoft man John Gossman) says.
That's the standard line from every also-ran vendor. "I'm not the vendor with a lock on the market? Well then, vendor lock-in must be a bad thing, or at least it is unless I get control of the market."
Oh, and if you're not in the cloud, or if you are in the cloud but only use one vendor then you should be fired? Let's deconstruct that a bit. "If you don't buy my product, then you should be fired". Or "if you buy my competitor's product and not mine, then you should be fired". Yes indeed, that's a very convincing argument about the technical and financial merits of Microsoft's Azure cloud product. Yes, I can see how Microsoft has indeed changed.
If you look at the cloud offerings by the market leaders (Amazon, Google, Microsoft), they're all about vendor lock-in. Moving a non-trivial site from one cloud vendor to another is as big of an effort as porting between operating systems. "Cloud" is the new operating system. It's a platform on which you run things. Moving from one vendor's cloud to another's is no more a push button operation than porting a C program from Windows to Linux is just a re-compile. These cloud vendors all know that once they've got enough of your non-commodity IT in their cloud, then for most normal businesses (i.e. companies who just use computers to do other things), the pain and cost of moving to a different vendor will keep you locked in just like those old VB6 and ASP programs keep you locked into MS Windows.
We had "public cloud" before. They were called time shares on mainframes. I've been paid in the past to move people off "public cloud" timeshare mainframes and on to PCs to get massive cost savings. It was a case of re-write from scratch rather than pushing a button.
I'm all in favour of the public cloud in the right applications. Saying though that it's the answer to everything is like saying that NOSQL databases are the answer to all data problems (because they're web scale).
I do think though that IT professionals are going to need to learn about Docker and other similar things in order to run applications on their own infrastructure. Once it is better developed, "private cloud" is going to be how people run their own on site systems, even at the small business level. It won't be about scaling to thousands of instances and global distribution. It will be about ease of installation and management. Done properly, all those nasty dependencies will get containerized, redundancy and migration will be built-in, and people will wonder how they ever did without it.
What everyone ought to be doing at this stage is to download at least one Linux distro that has good support for Docker and a large and active community around it, and start playing around with it so you can educate yourself. If you don't, you will end up like the mainframe guys who laughed at anything related to PCs or x86.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
