Microsoft has quietly made its own version of Linux and it's called Azure Cloud Switch

A far cry from the Linux as 'cancer' days, Steve…

Microsoft has gone and built its own version of Linux, although it's for data centre networking and is being called the Azure Cloud Switch (ACS).

ACS is what Microsoft is calling the company's first "foray into building our own software for running network devices like switches".

A cross-platform modular operating system, it's built on Linux which allows, says Azure Networking principal architect Kamala Subramaniam, the ability to debug, fix and test software bugs "much faster", as well as offering the flexibility "to scale down the software and develop features that are required" for typical data centre and networking requirements.

While it's a sensible idea for any company looking to craft more portable (and widely-supported) data centre software, the decision to build an operating system on Linux is slightly controversial. For a start, there are many who haven't yet forgotten ex-CEO Steve Ballmer's 2001 comment that "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches".

But that was 14 years ago, and Ballmer is long gone.

The perhaps more interesting point of note is that Microsoft has previously chosen to use slimmed-down versions of Windows to drive such ventures. It perhaps wasn't the most logical or straightforward method, but the company stuck to its guns.

Of course, after Ballmer's decade-old "cancer" comment, current CEO Satya Nadella said something just as surprising, if completely opposite, at a Microsoft cloud event in San Francisco last year. "Microsoft loves Linux" was Nadella's choice soundbite.

This was followed up by a series of Linux-friendly announcements at 2015's Build, including a platform-agnostic version of Visual Studio that runs happily on Ubuntu.

Back at 2014's Build conference, Nadella also kicked off his reign in a memorable way by releasing a ton of source code, including the .NET Compiler Platform, into the developer community.

But Microsoft using open-source code in-house for such a major project also shows the door swings both ways, illustrating a Microsoft increasingly prepared to just do whatever it needs to make a project work, rather than doggedly hanging on to dated business practices.

"We're talking about ACS publicly as 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," writes Subramaniam.

For more discussion on data centres, it's still not too late to sign up for C omputing's Data Centre and Infrastructure Summit, which takes place in London this coming Wednesday, 23 September 2015.