A few days ago Microsoft introduced its new operating system designed for IoT devices: Azure Sphere OS. The new operating system aims at providing a secure-by-default platform to build IoT services and thus avoiding the pitfalls that made such devices so prone even to unsophisticated attacks that rogue organizations use them to build botnets or to compromise users’ privacy.

The new OS

Azure Sphere is just a part of a broader solution to provide a secure platform for IoT that also includes custom microcontrollers that implement Microsoft 7 rules for IoT security and a security service that runs on Azure to verify the status of each device and report any error or possible compromission. That service will also provide updates to the OS and possibly remediation services for misbehaving devices.

Considerations

While many users on the Internet focused on the fact that Azure Sphere OS is based on a modified Linux kernel, Microsoft solution is quite more complicated than that. Many have been surprised by the fact that Microsoft is essentially providing a Linux distribution, though it isn’t the first time that Microsoft is shipping Unix if one remembers Xenix old days, but there are more interesting things about this solution other than the kernel that OS is running.

For sure it is interesting that Microsoft decided that Windows is too heavy to run onto microcontrollers and it resorted to a Linux-based solution. While many speculate about the inability of Microsoft to create a lightweight version of Windows, I think that they choose Linux for a simple reason: to gain some traction into the IoT space they obviously need to open-source the OS and I don’t think that they would be ready to provide an open-source version of Windows, albeit highly customized. At the same time, it would be difficult to push IoT partners into its camp with a closed-source software, given that most of them rely on free and lightweight specialized Linux distributions.

Moreover, since when Azure started, Microsoft became more a services provider rather than a software maker so its main goal is to create software that could be plugged into Azure whatever it is based upon. So no surprises that they decided not to reinvent the wheel by using an highly customized Linux-based environment and extend it with “Windows-inspired security features”. Microsoft also ran custom chips for years in their Xbox consoles.

It would be difficult to push IoT partners into its camp with a closed-source software, given that most of them rely on free and lightweight specialized Linux distributions

What is more interesting is the fact that Microsoft used containers to secure that environment. While for sure Azure Sphere OS has a specialized version of containerization, containers are emerging as a key mechanism to save resources while providing a high degree of security. Microsoft already implemented containers into its Windows Server 2016 and refined the concept to be able to run Linux as a part of Windows and it also provides Linux containers on a Windows machine, thus dramatically improving productivity and [...]