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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

#131

Post by lwkl »

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 is so much software written in Microsoft Access in my country that is basically irreplaceable. They have created interfaces to all the common industry software, vendors and devices and have all the common business processes built in.

Big chains probably have these things integrated in their ERP and CRM or use a custom software solution. But for smaller chains in their respective industries I don't see how you move these programs in the cloud right now without a complete rewrite.

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

#133

Post by nimbius »

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…

A few use cases come to mind:

- Microsoft often bundles discounts for their their desktop and server licenses (used for AD and such) with Azure credits. Managers are under pressure to use the free service to deliver value, so teams are told to spin up things in azure as they see fit. reject the credits and reject the discount for the stuff you do use.

- Office 365, Outlook, Xbox Live, Xbox Music and Video, the Microsoft website, MSN, Search, and Visual Studio Online all run in Azure either in whole or in part. If you think Microsoft doesnt dog-food their cloud to pump its numbers, you probably werent around when they bought out shared hosting providers "park website" clusters and converted them to IIS instances to inflate their Netcraft numbers against Apache.

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

#134

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

freefriedrice wrote: post #110
martinald wrote: post #49

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…

Yeah, that's a good point. There is a big difference between Linux and BSD here. Linux has really exploded with configuration. Are we using 'ip' or 'ifconfig'? Are we using /etc/ or /etc/ .d/? What about /lib/system? Do I restart that systemctrl or service? BSD has kept it a little more "pure" in that it is more of a "only one way to do it" philosophy.

One of Linux's many great failings: it constantly seeks to reinvent the wheel. Unfortunately modern Microsoft is also suffering from this terrible affliction.

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

#135

Post by FpUser »

GordonS wrote: post #31
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 used Windows on desktop since 3.1, and nowadays Windows 10 is my daily driver - IMO it's the best desktop OS, and always has been. But for servers, I much prefer Linux. It uses less resources, and it's so much easier to get it into a known and consistent state that Windows. Also, something about having a GUI for servers has always felt... wrong somehow!

Almost the same here. I do not really have problems with GUI on server besides you can configure Windows server run without one. But the pricing however is not very attractive for smaller fish.

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

#136

Post by Mr_Sweater »

This might be short sighted of me, I dont have a ton of cloud experience but I imagine its as obvious as Linux scales orders of magnitude better than Windows, the projects that need massive scale go cloud. Conversely sql server can demand massive scaling, I wonder what percent of Win Server are for sql server workloads.

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

#137

Post by freefriedrice »

dijit wrote: post #66
martinald wrote: post #49

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…

Maybe you can check out openbsd. It's as opinionated as you are. (FWIW there has always been a level of consistency in Linux w.r.t. file paths, if you stick to your distribution maintainers packages)

In another post I point out that BSD has done a great job keeping things consistent, whereas linux is a bit of a freeforall trying new stuff.

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

#138

Post by vageli »

aea12 wrote: post #125
vageli wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your interpretation is more telling of your own worldview than the parent. It had never occurred to me that such a failure mode could happen, and I thought it was a good story to share. It seems like something that may have been caught had a crematorium management system been in place.

My own worldview that people are universally people and we all deserve dignity in death? Yeah, I know, what a tragic way of looking at things. I drink myself to death over it. Even accepting your criticism, the same exact thing is communicable without (a) the unnecessary detail about the decedent’s weight and (b) specific recollections of the event in question. Tradespeople communicate like that among each other beca…

Goodness, it seems your speech becomes more inflammatory with every edit. I'm sorry if I offended you—I think talking about the disasters are important in engineering—it's part of the process. In the same vein that FAA regulations are "written in blood". The deceased's weight could have been (and sounds like it was) a compounding factor in this event. It seems a process improvement could have prevented this, but we should avoid the entire conversation because it involved death?

edit: To address the content of another edit you made: yes, part of what makes HackerNews the incredible place it is is from people sharing anecdotes and semi-related stories.

I really don't care to continue this conversation, your hostility is unwarranted.

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

#140

Post by tpush »

dmw_ng wrote: post #55
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…

It bears repeating the the majority of software development happens on Windows (and I say that as a Mac guy).
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