Windows IoT, short for Windows Internet of Things and formerly known as Windows Embedded, is a family of operating systems from Microsoft designed for use in embedded systems. Microsoft has three different subfamilies of operating systems for embedded devices targeting a wide market, ranging from small-footprint, real-time devices to point of sale (POS) devices like kiosks. Windows Embedded operating systems are available to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), who make it available to end users preloaded with their hardware, in addition to volume license customers in some cases.
Microsoft Azure, or just Azure, is the cloud computing platform developed by Microsoft. It has management, access and development of applications and services to individuals, companies, and governments through its global infrastructure. It also provides capabilities that are usually not included within other cloud platforms, including software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Microsoft Azure supports many programming languages, tools, and frameworks, including Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems.
OpenShift is a family of containerization software products developed by Red Hat. Its flagship product is the OpenShift Container Platform — a hybrid cloud platform as a service built around Linux containers orchestrated and managed by Kubernetes on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The family's other products provide this platform through different environments: OKD serves as the community-driven upstream, Several deployment methods are available including self-managed, cloud native under ROSA, ARO and RHOIC on AWS, Azure, and IBM Cloud respectively, OpenShift Online as software as a service, and OpenShift Dedicated as a managed service.
The Windows Package Manager is a free and open-source package manager designed by Microsoft for Windows 10 and Windows 11. It consists of a command-line utility and a set of services for installing applications. Independent software vendors can use it as a distribution channel for their software packages.
Docker is a set of platform as a service (PaaS) products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. The service has both free and premium tiers. The software that hosts the containers is called Docker Engine. It was first released in 2013 and is developed by Docker, Inc.
Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Originally designed by Google, the project is now maintained by a worldwide community of contributors, and the trademark is held by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Apache Mesos is an open-source project to manage computer clusters. It was developed at the University of California, Berkeley.
Snap is a software packaging and deployment system developed by Canonical for operating systems that use the Linux kernel and the systemd init system. The packages, called snaps, and the tool for using them, snapd, work across a range of Linux distributions and allow upstream software developers to distribute their applications directly to users. Snaps are self-contained applications running in a sandbox with mediated access to the host system. Snap was originally released for cloud applications but was later ported to also work for Internet of Things devices and desktop applications.
MinIO is an object storage system released under GNU Affero General Public License v3.0. It is API compatible with the Amazon S3 cloud storage service. It is capable of working with unstructured data such as photos, videos, log files, backups, and container images with the maximum supported object size being 50TB.
Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a feature of Microsoft Windows that allows developers to run a Linux environment without the need for a separate virtual machine or dual booting. There are two versions of WSL: WSL 1 and WSL 2. WSL is not available to all Windows 10 users by default. It can be installed either by joining the Windows Insider program or manually via Microsoft Store or Winget.
Windows Server 2019 is the thirteenth version of the Windows Server operating system by Microsoft, as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems. It is the second version of the server operating system based on the Windows 10 platform, after Windows Server 2016. It was announced on March 20, 2018 for the first Windows Insider preview release, and was released internationally on October 2, 2018, the same release date of Windows 10 version 1809. It was succeeded by Windows Server 2022 on August 18, 2021.
ZeroTier, Inc. is a software company with a freemium business model based in Irvine, California. ZeroTier provides proprietary software, SDKs and commercial products and services to create and manage virtual software-defined networks. The company's flagship end-user product ZeroTier One is a client application that enables devices such as PCs, phones, servers and embedded devices to securely connect to peer-to-peer virtual networks.
Container Linux is a discontinued open-source lightweight operating system based on the Linux kernel and designed for providing infrastructure for clustered deployments. One of its focuses was scalability. As an operating system, Container Linux provided only the minimal functionality required for deploying applications inside software containers, together with built-in mechanisms for service discovery and configuration sharing.
Microsoft, a technology company historically known for its opposition to the open source software paradigm, turned to embrace the approach in the 2010s. From the 1970s through 2000s under CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft viewed the community creation and sharing of communal code, later to be known as free and open source software, as a threat to its business, and both executives spoke negatively against it. In the 2010s, as the industry turned towards cloud, embedded, and mobile computing—technologies powered by open source advances—CEO Satya Nadella led Microsoft towards open source adoption although Microsoft's traditional Windows business continued to grow throughout this period generating revenues of 26.8 billion in the third quarter of 2018, while Microsoft's Azure cloud revenues nearly doubled.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is a Linux Foundation project that was started in 2015 to help advance container technology and align the tech industry around its evolution.
The Software for Open Networking in the Cloud or alternatively abbreviated and stylized as SONiC, is a free and open source network operating system based on Linux. It was originally developed by Microsoft and the Open Compute Project. In 2022, Microsoft ceded oversight of the project to the Linux Foundation, who will continue to work with the Open Compute Project for continued ecosystem and developer growth. SONiC includes the networking software components necessary for a fully functional L3 device and was designed to meet the requirements of a cloud data center. It allows cloud operators to share the same software stack across hardware from different switch vendors and works on over 100 different platforms. There are multiple companies offering enterprise service and support for SONiC.
OneFuzz is a cross-platform free and open source fuzz testing framework by Microsoft. The software enables continuous developer-driven fuzz testing to identify weaknesses in computer software prior to release.
Harvester is a cloud native hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) open source software. Harvester was announced in 2020 by SUSE.
Cilium is a cloud native technology for networking, observability, and security. It is based on the kernel technology eBPF, originally for better networking performance, and now leverages many additional features for different use cases. The core networking component has evolved from only providing a flat Layer 3 network for containers to including advanced networking features, like BGP and Service mesh, within a Kubernetes cluster, across multiple clusters, and connecting with the world outside Kubernetes. Hubble was created as the network observability component and Tetragon was later added for security observability and runtime enforcement. Cilium runs on Linux and is one of the first eBPF applications being ported to Microsoft Windows through the eBPF on Windows project.
