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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

#91
post #53

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 ?

If you have wine in your production stack you gotta be doing something wrong. I did have some reporting tools run in Dosbox though as we couldn’t get the printer working without it. And it printed the reports and OCR’d them in because every time someone tried to rewrite that reporting tool they never got the same numbers and nobody wanted to be the one who answered the question as to “well whose right”

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

#92

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…

I think both are a mess under the hood. I cannot make sense of where things will be configured in Linux. maybe /etc/, maybe somewhere else, with loads of setting file configurations. There's not a huge amount of consistency. What would be interesting is a complete re-imagining of a server OS. Consistent file locations for everything, which are automatically versioned a la git allowing you to roll back any specific ch…

It moves around as well. There's a huge distinction between Linux _as a kernel_ and "Linux" _as an operating system_. The kernel has the same layout across all the distributions / operating systems, but everything else is up to the particular stack that distro chose. Gentoo is different from Redhat which is different from Debian, etc.

You can do what you describe without changing the kernel, but you would need to modify the userspace environment. One of my toy projects has been trying to run all "user" applications in filesystem sandboxes because I'm sick of how many random "dot-files/directories" get created in my home folder.

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

#93
post #46

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…

If you use rhel the guarantees are also very strong though it requires some extra steps to package and distribute your own software. Ubuntu on the other hand I've found breaks stuff often enough to be a nuisance.

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

#94
post #85
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Most Microsoft technology is completely free for non professionals. PC came with a Windows CD or the OS was per-installed already. You could install IIS (ASP server, l.limited to 5 users) from the Windows CD. I used the classic notepad.exe to code. It was kinda standard to buy the Office package, which came with a file based database. There where plenty of free tutorials on the web, and IIS also had some examples. And there where services that would host your web app for free. If you wanted to do "real" programming you had to buy books and a compiler which was super expensive.

Moving to Linux was a new world opening, that I had only seen glimpses of before. Using apt-get to install an app was mind blowing. Getting used to the command line took a while, but now I do everything from the terminal, except some GUI apps and the browser. Still have to look up most commands and read man pages though.

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

#95
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft uses Windows behind the scenes on a lot of their managed services, but specifically for VMs on Azure... I'm as clueless as you (and I say that as someone who work in the enterprise space for mostly Microsoft shops).

I was surprised to see that the web server for www.microsoft.com reports via the 'Server:' header that it runs on IIS 10. To me that just seems weird... even though it's their product.

It's out there. One website that always impresses me with its extreme speed is McMaster-Carr. Their Server header also claims they're using IIS.

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

#96
post #53

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 ?

I would bet that the license doesn’t encourage that, and SQL Server is the sort of software where the license is king.

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

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think both are a mess under the hood. I cannot make sense of where things will be configured in Linux. maybe /etc/, maybe somewhere else, with loads of setting file configurations. There's not a huge amount of consistency. What would be interesting is a complete re-imagining of a server OS. Consistent file locations for everything, which are automatically versioned a la git allowing you to roll back any specific ch…

I'd still take a heavily configurable and customizable "mess", as you put it, than the one that doesn't allow me to control how it works. There's a good reason why Linux absolutely dominates the server space.

> "There's a good reason why Linux absolutely dominates the server space."

Yeah, it was cheaper (in both senses of the word) than all the other contenders and more or less Unixy enough that software could easily be ported over.

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

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> RegEdit, is there a text version for that?

AFAIK, yes, it's at %WINDIR%\System32\reg.exe

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

#99

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…

I think both are a mess under the hood. I cannot make sense of where things will be configured in Linux. maybe /etc/, maybe somewhere else, with loads of setting file configurations. There's not a huge amount of consistency. What would be interesting is a complete re-imagining of a server OS. Consistent file locations for everything, which are automatically versioned a la git allowing you to roll back any specific ch…

This is where Kubernetes points, FWIW :)

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

#100

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…

re: Crematorium Management System, it might be possible to do that rather easily with a CRM? I develop mostly with CiviCRM (https://civicrm.org). It is contact-centric (rather than sales-centric), with good workflows for communications. You can add custom fields or custom activity types to track specific types of data or activities.

However, my experience in those kind of niches, is that the client will likely be very non-technical, and will prefer to use what everyone else is using, even if it's vastly overpriced and locks their processes in place.

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