Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores • Hacker News Board

Re: Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores

#51

Post by qubex » Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:17 PM UTC

jamieweb wrote: post #23

I'm interested to know what the majority of the Windows machines are used for. I can't think it'd be anything other than 'big enterprise' applications, where there seems to be a lot of bespoke stuff built specifically for Windows Server (e.g. finance software, healthcare systems, marriage registration, taxi licensing, nursing home management, etc). Unfortunately this sort of stuff is fairly rare to be available in th…

I’ve never heard of a crematorium management system, but once when I was doing the rounds at my chemical factory I came across the technician who handled the burners for our boilers.

It was October so he was doing a checkup before firing them up. I went in for some PR chit-chat. Unfortunately he took it as a genuine occasion for conversation (genuinely lovely guy, genuinely liked him, genuinely liked the conversations, but... well...)

“Yeah yeah, you guys are great, calling me in to do preventative maintenance before firing ‘em up.” “Yeah, it’s protocol, I guess.” “Yeah yeah, but not everybody follow protocol y’know...” “Really?” “Yeah yeah, no... just came over from the crematorium.. they had a fat client inside and the burner conked out and we had to pull ‘em out half-done and let the chamber cool off so I could service the damned thing.” “...” “Yeah yeah, real bitch of a mornin’. Family there and everything. Waiting for the ashes, y’know?” “That must’ve been awkward.”“Yeah yeah, no no, they understood... you only do these things once, y’know... yeah yeah... bitch of a mornin’.”“Well I guess I’ll leave you to it then.” “Yeah yeah see you around."

Re: Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores

#52

Post by addicted44 » Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:17 PM UTC

NicoJuicy wrote: post #33

rhacker wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always got the feeling that MS specific developers are highly visual studio oriented. They have their connection string built into the IDE. In fact, if you asked them to make something that builds from the command line, and runs, they would probably be scratching their head for a while. It wouldn't surprise me at all to find some windows based companies that have classic windows VMs in the cloud, running Visual…

I'm one "visual studio Dev" I have also build in Go, nodejs, Php, RoR. But VS is truelly the best IDE experience I have witnessed. Database changes are automatically migrated and deployed using entity framework fyi. The big deployment button changes the connection string per deployment, deploys with feature flags directly and automatically migrates the db to the latest version

It's kind of funny to see the disdain for VS based deployment here, while all the current rage right now is declarative deployment systems.

Something VS based development, build and deployment based workflows have been doing for over a decade through the largely Web..config files and .csproj files.

Re: Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores

#53

Post by sitkack » Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:19 PM UTC

pmiller2 wrote: post #30

jamieweb wrote: post #23

I'm interested to know what the majority of the Windows machines are used for. I can't think it'd be anything other than 'big enterprise' applications, where there seems to be a lot of bespoke stuff built specifically for Windows Server (e.g. finance software, healthcare systems, marriage registration, taxi licensing, nursing home management, etc). Unfortunately this sort of stuff is fairly rare to be available in th…

Other than bespoke enterprise apps, my guess would be the majority of the remaining Windows machines run SQL server.

Doesn't SQL server run under Wine or https://reactos.org/wiki/ReactOS ?

Re: Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores

#54

Post by Krustopolis » Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:20 PM UTC

z3t4 wrote: post #46

jamieweb wrote: post #23

I'm interested to know what the majority of the Windows machines are used for. I can't think it'd be anything other than 'big enterprise' applications, where there seems to be a lot of bespoke stuff built specifically for Windows Server (e.g. finance software, healthcare systems, marriage registration, taxi licensing, nursing home management, etc). Unfortunately this sort of stuff is fairly rare to be available in th…

I was on the Windows platform for 15 years and moved over to Linux about 6 years ago. One thing I miss from Windows Server is that it was very stable, updates never broke anything. If you got any updates that is. I think most people use Windows server because they are locked into Microsoft technology. I switched to Linux, and most importantly open source technology - in order to get out of the Windows ecosystem. I sw…

Could you please provide a link to some cases where Microsoft is suing Linux users for violating their patents? I thought they stopped that practice years ago.

Re: Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores

#55

Post by dmw_ng » Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:21 PM UTC

jamieweb wrote: post #23

I'm interested to know what the majority of the Windows machines are used for. I can't think it'd be anything other than 'big enterprise' applications, where there seems to be a lot of bespoke stuff built specifically for Windows Server (e.g. finance software, healthcare systems, marriage registration, taxi licensing, nursing home management, etc). Unfortunately this sort of stuff is fairly rare to be available in th…

You don't see it on HN much but the Windows world is still massive, and there are still plenty of ASP.NET folk around. I'd suppose you only have to take half a footstep outside the "pure Internet services" sphere to start bumping into lots of Windows, in pretty much any direction you happen to step.

There are also whole industries where Windows has a particularly strong influence, e.g. (from experience) some parts of finance, petroleum, television, and I imagine things like render farms or other specialist graphics work that might have grown out of a once Windows-only desktop software cottage industry.

I guess it's also important to say, much as you might find a zealous love for UNIX inside many (computer) engineering-led organizations, similar loyalty to Windows exists in many more (locally under-represented) industries for reasons that are less likely to be understood around here.

Re: Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores

#56

Post by mmcconnell1618 » Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:21 PM UTC

rhacker wrote: post #19

tombert wrote: post #11

This is hardly surprising. Not to crap on MS, but I do think Linux has traditionally just been a better operating system for servers, probably due to the fact that that's where most of the funding for Linux ends up going, with the desktop versions of Linux being sort of secondary. It doesn't help that a lot of serverey software is kind of designed with POSIX-ey stuff in mind. Node.js took awhile to get Windows suppor…

I've always got the feeling that MS specific developers are highly visual studio oriented. They have their connection string built into the IDE. In fact, if you asked them to make something that builds from the command line, and runs, they would probably be scratching their head for a while. It wouldn't surprise me at all to find some windows based companies that have classic windows VMs in the cloud, running Visual…

The Visual Studio ecosystem has supported command line builds for a long time. msbuild commands are run by Visual Studio and display right in the console. The .NET Core stack is also very command line first designed.

I think what you're noticing is that Visual Studio makes it easier for point-and-click developers to participate while a bash shell takes a little more effort to learn. You can have poor developers in both worlds or great developers in both worlds.

Re: Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores

#57

Post by hi41 » Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:22 PM UTC

I bought books such as Linux Programming Interface to learn linux so that I can apply for jobs. Later I discovered that when the companies say Linux, they don't mean writing native applications on Linux, but that they are actually talking about java applications on app servers such as JBoss. Does anyone write native applications like thick client native applications on Windows which is also rare these days.

Re: Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores

#58

Post by [deleted] » Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:22 PM UTC

sitkack wrote: post #53

pmiller2 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other than bespoke enterprise apps, my guess would be the majority of the remaining Windows machines run SQL server.

Doesn't SQL server run under Wine or https://reactos.org/wiki/ReactOS ?

[deleted]

Re: Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores

#59

Post by martinald » Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:22 PM UTC

jamieweb wrote: post #23

I'm interested to know what the majority of the Windows machines are used for. I can't think it'd be anything other than 'big enterprise' applications, where there seems to be a lot of bespoke stuff built specifically for Windows Server (e.g. finance software, healthcare systems, marriage registration, taxi licensing, nursing home management, etc). Unfortunately this sort of stuff is fairly rare to be available in th…

There's absolutely _millions_ of .NET web apps that target 'old' .NET framework out there. Migrating from .NET to .NET Core isn't trivial for most projects and can be very very challenging for others, to the point where it's probably not worth even attempting it. These apps will still be running for years or decades and Azure has by far the best Windows cloud experience.

Re: Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores

#60

Post by oneplane » Tue, May 12, 2020, 7:23 PM UTC

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #36

freefriedrice wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows came from the single-user domain. Unix came from server space. It is literally two different evolutionary paths. From day-1, Unix was built for shared file systems, multi-user accounts, and distributed computing. Networking on Microsoft was an afterthought until the mid-90's. Sure there were token ring and banyan vines drivers in the late 80's early 90's, but that was to share a drive letter. The entire idea…

> " Windows came from the single-user domain. Unix came from server space. " Windows 9x came from the single-user domain but is long dead except for compatibility stuff left over in modern Windows. Windows NT and its successors came from server space from its VMS lineage.

While that is true, the win32 API and other stuff that floats on top of NT for the GUI based stuff (which is most stuff) is still very much restricted by that legacy.

NT was supposed to be very tunable and modular and have multiple personalities and abstractions but it turns out it mostly is just win32-on-NT and everything else ended up being on top of win32.

It has gotten better, especially post-OneCore, but it still is very much restricted compared to Linux, BSD and Unix.

Windows NT (and VMS) were not as much multi-user server as they were more closer to mainframes (which died/are dying for their own reasons). VMS, like plan9, had concepts to allow many (theoretically) fancy server things, but were to much a created world instead of a grown world (like post-system-v). Also, while the VMS dude who was on the NT team did influence it heavily, the legacy they had to support made it almost impossible to use any of that fancy 'new' stuff back then. While it was orders of magnitude better than DOS, it feels like Windows needs to make yet another evolution like it did going from DOS to NT to get back to current times instead of patching on top of patches every time.