I'm not sure I understand why this is the case, is there some advantage Azure has for hosting Linux that the many other providers don't have?
Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores
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Re: Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores
#82I think Microsoft figured one thing out; you can’t fire a man who get things done especially if there is little documentation.
And you can’t avoid writing things down if you can’t remember it.
And you can’t remember it if it isn’t visual.
I am way more productive on Linux, but I can see that this also put you in a position to easily be replaced.
Re: Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores
#83I'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 don't have actual numbers obviously, but I'd imagine that a lot of Xbox multiplayer game backends and probably all of Xbox Live is running on Azure Windows servers, and Xbox is a pretty big platform by number of users. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/11/microsoft-wants-azur... https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/gaming/
The keyword that seems to be missing from both of those links is "Windows". Seems they are running on Azure alright, but that they are using Windows doesn't seem to be so sure.
Re: Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn’t be crazy if Windows wasn’t a licensed closed source OS, but that’s exactly what it is. That’s the definition of vendor lock.
Maybe ask it a different way. Is it crazy for a bar that brews its own beer to prefer to serve it?
If the majority of customers prefers another beer they also sell? Yes, kind of. If the customers most likely wants the other beer, you're wasting his time by asking him whether he wants to try your special brew.
I don't believe Microsoft is attached to making Windows the default though. Who knows why it is, maybe because people that use the Wizard are likely playing around and will rather want a Windows system? My guess is they'll switch the default if the percentages shift even more and they see that most that manually set something up will change the default. In the end, they want to sell computing and anything that gets in the way, well, gets in the way.
Re: Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores
#85I'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…
I went for a while of bumping into lots of job opportuntities using the Microsoft stack, and thought perhaps it would be good for my career to learn a bit.
But the barrier to entry seemed so high at the time - you needed MSDN subscriptions, paid IDEs, and paid servers. All out of my reach as a self taught junior developer.
I don't know how or where everyone learnt it all, except as graduate developers at BigCorp?
Re: Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores
#86I'm not sure I understand why this is the case, is there some advantage Azure has for hosting Linux that the many other providers don't have?
I suspect Linux is the majority across all hosting services. No OS license nonsense to worry about and easy to remotely administer with a simple ssh connection.
Re: Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that networking stuff feels pretty frustrating on Windows compared to POSIXey stuff; for the most part using a good networking library like (as mentioned above) ZeroMQ or even some of the built-in JVM socketing stuff will help abstract it, but Unix sockets are simply better out of the box. Even a simpler example though; the fact that there wasn't really a built-in analog for the "pipe" until PowerShell sort o…
socketing stuff will help abstract it, but Unix sockets are simply better out of the box Can you elaborate? Do you mean performance? Because the on the C level both use (apart from some minor differences, which aren't enough to call one 'simply better' than the other) the same berkeley socket API.
Again, haven't touched Windows in years so it's entirely possible that I'm wrong or out of date, but the last time I did any kind of networking on Windows was with the WinSock API, which if I recall correctly, didn't have any support for any kind of IPC out of the box, and I had to do everything with TCP.
I might have been too harsh on Windows there, I've never paid to do any direct socket-level programming within Windows.
Re: Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores
#88I'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 don't have actual numbers obviously, but I'd imagine that a lot of Xbox multiplayer game backends and probably all of Xbox Live is running on Azure Windows servers, and Xbox is a pretty big platform by number of users. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/11/microsoft-wants-azur... https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/gaming/
This Xbox service runs on Kubernetes: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/building-xbox-game-st... (I work on Azure, focusing on Linux and open source technologies)
Re: Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows Server is available in a "core" edition without a GUI.
Not only that but pretty much everything on Windows Server is exposed to PowerShell and has been for some time.
And does it actually have well tested, well known, reliable functionality on everything you tend to use? Configuration of programs using easy to edit text files vs some system of ticking checkboxes in a GUI?
RegEdit, is there a text version for that? Imo there's no comparison to the Linux ecosystem.
Windows is GUI first.
Re: Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know, I was thinking this, but honestly how much overhead is the Windows GUI when no one is logged into it? I know it's not nothing, but I suspect it's not that much, is it?
Windows Server is available in a "core" edition without a GUI.
Great, *nix has been available in that way for hmmm, maybe a few decades.