Russinovich On The Record

Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich knows more about the inner workings of Windows than most of the world's population. He has held a number of roles since joining Microsoft in 2006 when it bought Winternals, a system recovery tool vendor that he co-founded. Now, as CTO of Azure, he's tasked with making Microsoft's public cloud run like a well-oiled machine.

Russinovich has for years been one of Microsoft's most popular public speakers, mainly because he's that rare type of technical visionary who speaks and presents information in a way that even the uninitiated can understand. Russinovich just might have the most important job at Microsoft right now, since Azure represents the cornerstone of CEO Satya Nadella's "Cloud First, Mobile First" strategy.

Russinovich sat down with CRN recently for a wide-ranging interview in which he discussed Microsoft's approach to dealing with recent Azure outages, its embrace of Docker containers and open source software, in general, its work with Google on container management, and why he thinks the notion of cross-cloud workload portability is still difficult to achieve. Following is a lightly edited transcript of that conversation.