Microsoft Starts a New Windows Core OS Platform Blog

Anyone looking for a little more in-depth information about the underpinnings of Windows will want to check out Microsoft’s newest blog.

“The Windows Core OS platform team owns the core of the Windows operating system, primarily, the virtualization platform, silicon support (Intel, AMD, and Arm), kernel, storage file system and hyperconverged storage infrastructure including Spaces Direct,” Microsoft’s Hari Pulapaka writes in the introductory post. “In addition, we also build and deploy a specially crafted operating system based on Windows for the Azure Cloud. We migrated our old blog which was focused purely on Windows kernel to incorporate the full stack of tech owned by the team.”

The members of this team will use the Windows Core OS platform team blog to discuss the internals of upcoming features in the Windows Core OS platform, Pulapaka notes. And the first non-introductory post discusses how the team provides a special-purpose host operating system for the Azure Cloud, called Cloud Host.

“Cloud Host is a specially crafted console only (no GUI, some also call it headless) edition of Windows, a OneCore-based edition of Windows,” he explains. “OneCore is the base layer upon which all the families of Windows SKUs (or editions) build their functionality. It is a set of components (executables, DLLs, etc.) that are needed by all editions of Windows (PCs, Windows Server, XBOX, or IoT). For a programming analogy, it is the base class from which all the Windows classes inherit (e.g., Object). If you look inside OneCore to see what functionality it provides, you can see API sets that provide core functionality such as Kernel, Hypervisor, File system support, Networking, Security, Win32 APIs, etc.”

Very interesting.