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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

#141
post #138
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

The only thing that offends me in this conversation is what this profession, and forum, do to people. You very poignantly included.

Keep trying to turn this around on me and my sensibilities or sense of offense, and I’ll keep right on ignoring it. I’m very comfortable on the absolutely right side of this, and just about as annoyed as OP was that you’re interacting with me at all and that I have to share a planet with people who think like you.

When an FAA policymaker gets on HN and tells us what the deceased passengers on the airplane smelled like, you’ll have an argument. There’s a difference between dancing among the foul and treating it clinically, and hitting me with the latter in a thread doing the former is incredibly disingenuous.

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

#142
post #63

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 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…

Windows IO model - including network - is arguably much more well designed than anything POSIX, thanks not least to Dave Cutler and his team.

From the get-go Windows NT (Win32) had a common model for overlapped IO (async IO in today's parlance). This async capability permeated everything from disk IO to network IO, and works well today with USB, Thunderbolt etc. Mind you, this model has not changed while Unix/Linux/POSIX still have not found a common model that works for all. See for instance https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13407542/is-there-really...

Under the hood Windows was also designed with a completion-oriented model (IO completion ports) which scales better in most instances than the Linux readiness-oriented approach (I believe that MacOS uses a completion approach as well, so the readiness approach is not universal *nix). Basically, windows saves at least one context switch for every basic IO operation. Windows supports the Berkeley sockets API with some optional extensions to make socket operations overlapped/async as well, essentially supporting both the straight socket model as well as the completion oriented extensions.

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

#143

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 burned through a lot of Azure credit playing Football Manager on beefy instances, but presumably that's not representative.

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

#144
post #107

Yeah, those plebeian tool swingers often woefully misinterpret the shrewd protocols of someone who non-ironically shares that “unfortunately another human had a personal conversation with me after I started a business conversation”. It’s a real problem. Sorry that happened to you. Better to avoid people entirely and stick to Excel, in my experience, but the good news is you got a completely appropriate and tasteful a…

For your own sake, make sure to never read anything by Solzhenitsyn.

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

#145
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

There are tons of restaurants that have their own specialty drinks like their home made soda or root beer or their own alcoholic beers, but most customers pick Budweiser and Coca Cola.

It's not crazy for them to suggest their own home-made soda first, it's marketing. Because that specialty soda makes them more money and differentiates them from their competitors who are just selling off-the-shelf stuff.

It's not crazy to not want to be a commodity.

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

#146

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…

My understanding is that if you're using Microsoft's Hypervisor product, the management console allows you to seamlessly deploy either to a VM on local hosts or in the Azure cloud (presumably through a VPN). I imagine that makes it easy to spin up those extra windows machines and licenses you need to support all the extra Active Directory add-ons you can get (inventory management, update management, SQL server to handle their data, etc) on Azure rather than procuring more hardware.

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

#147

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 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/

At least some of the Halo games used Orleans as part of the multiplayer backend:

https://github.com/dotnet/orleans

Orleans can run on .NET Core now, but I don't believe .NET Core existed when those backends were first created. So they would've been running under the full .NET Framework on Windows.

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

#148

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.

Having grown up under Solaris, which was BSD-flavored at one time, and then added SysV commands, and when Linux was on the ascent, added the GNU suite ... all I have to say is, bring it! All the inconsistent compile options for sed, find, things that look the same but don't act the same. Bah! :) It mystified me that epel packages install by default in /opt so you have to stick /opt/rh/blah/bin in PATH, and the attendant libraries. Considering the OS war in the 90s between Microsoft and Sun, it's a little funny, like cry-a-bit funny. Mr. McNealy would be surprise how his spats (probably for show) with Mssrs. Gates and Ballmer turn out.

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

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am very interested in the book you mention, simply out of passion. How do you find it?

Assuming this... https://www.amazon.com/Linux-Programming-Interface-System-Ha...

I see my question was rather daft.

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

#150
post #144
post #107

Yeah, those plebeian tool swingers often woefully misinterpret the shrewd protocols of someone who non-ironically shares that “unfortunately another human had a personal conversation with me after I started a business conversation”. It’s a real problem. Sorry that happened to you. Better to avoid people entirely and stick to Excel, in my experience, but the good news is you got a completely appropriate and tasteful a…

For your own sake, make sure to never read anything by Solzhenitsyn.

Why, did The Gulag Archipelago grow a chapter about Microsoft Azure since the last time I read it? Or is it easier to take someone you disagree with down a peg by drawing attention to and making light of perceived sensitivity issues?
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