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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

#231

Post by tracker1 »

adwww wrote: post #85
z3t4 wrote: 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?

I used "C# The Complete Reference" with the command line compilers to learn it in the later beta and through the 2002 release. No IDE, just a windows desktop.

I think VS Community started in 2015... there was also a SharpDevelop and MonoDevelop option in between, from pretty early on. I used SharpDevelop on my own projects for a number of years. Around 2011 I started using Node more and have been back and forth on projects since.

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

#232

Post by tracker1 »

adwww wrote: post #166
z3t4 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. An…

I think my experience might have been crippled a bit by having had a mac as my main PC since university, meaning less easy access to a non-locked down Windows installation. Much the same way as Windows users probably are not big objective C developers... It just felt like for a server language like .NET that your personal laptop shouldn't really matter much.

In that space, you'd mostly have needed to use Mono and MonoDevelop, depending on the time-frame.. after MS bought Xamarin, Visual Studio for Mac is actually a descendant of MonoDevelop

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

#233

Post by jamieweb »

gorgoiler wrote: post #204
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…

The real skill I try to teach my pupils, when joining top down ICT skills to bottom up CS / hacker skills, is to be able to re use existing tools in new and creative ways. This is especially applicable if you learn a bunch of generic “everything is a text file” hacker skills, maybe with a little code on top. Could you manage the crematorium using YAML files edited in GitHub? Maybe. Any collaborative tool with tagging…

I definitely agree with you in regards to the "everything is a text file" thing, but the average computer user doesn't know how to properly utilise text files and manage them effectively.

This is similar to the fact that basic knowledge of file systems and file formats is lacking in many modern teenagers, because this is all abstracted away by smartphone apps and cloud storage.

As a tech guy, I'd love to run the crematorium using YAML files in GitHub, but the reality is that the target audience for the system is Funeral Directors and Cremation Assistants, so it needs to be a non-technical user interface.

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

#234

Post by freefriedrice »

tombert wrote: post #63
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…

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…

It hasn't changed! Except for PowerShell, but that's... oy.

I have PowerShell, Git Shell and Cygwin running on my windows Dev box and all three make me cry on a weekly basis because I have to switch between them to do different things. I suppose one day I will sit down to fix my Windows dev environment, but it makes me feel so bloody frustrated that my muscle-memory shell is so ... perverted by windows implementations.

MS is bringing Bash to windows natively. I don't know how that is going to work since piping just isn't there, but I've got my fingers crossed that I'll only have to deal with ONE shell for windows!!!

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

#235

Post by koffiezet »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #183
jandrese wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can see the benefits of Linux, I'm just wondering why host it on Azure.

Depends on your situation. If you're already in bed with Microsoft, the support you get is pretty damn nice, and surprised me a lot.

A client of mine, a large multinational's overall corporate IT is very much Microsoft oriented, but I was working together with an R&D division, setting up a Linux/k8s-based proof of concept project. Somehow, the Azure team got wind of this and asked if we could meet. I expected absolutely nothing, but they ended up sending very competent technical sales guy, together with 2 engineers, that could answer every single question I threw at them, and they offered to help designing and setting up the infrastructure part, without us ever asking, no strings or invoices attached.

I think this sped up the poc by about a month or 2, just because they backed my opinion pretty much all the time, and had very valuable feedback and proposals to tackle certain other things. It also removed a lot of political crap, which is always there in a multinational. Being able to show the department head that Microsoft agreed with my solutions carried quite a bit of weight, and it didn't hurt my position at all.

Now, one of the managers tried to get the same support from both AWS and Google. AWS could send us some engineers (which would just be some freelance AWS certified engineers), but they fully determined the schedule (first slot we could get was 3 months after us asking), and there was a quite hefty invoice attached. Google didn't even respond. Now I know that cloud providers don't work that way, but many businesses don't like that. They want to be able to call someone when shit hits the fan. MS just uses their "boots on the ground" to also push azure within such businesses, and I'm not surprised it's working.

But would I host stuff there myself? Doubt it. I think the top 3 cloud providers are just too expensive.

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

#236

Post by tracker1 »

int_19h wrote: post #206
kylemuir wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true now but it wasn't when I started doing dot net development ~10 years ago. If it wasn't for my employer covering the costs I wouldn't have been able to do it. There were free editions but they were crippled versions of the paid ones with no extensions, etc. The free versions were generally unloved and had annoying quirks. At the time you needed to add a Resharper license in there too to be decently produc…

I disagree that Resharper was required to be "decently productive". Resharper turned your Honda of a Visual Studio into a Lexus, and Java developers (who were already used to Lexuses of their own) appreciated it... but you can still drive around with a Honda. Similarly, the limits on extensions in Express editions wouldn't hinder learning .NET development, or even working on most projects. However, VS Express itself…

I learned from the sdk command line and a book... mostly because after 9-11 within a couple months my day job and side job were gone and had lots of time on my hands for about 8 months... through the later betas and the 2002 release I hadn't touched an IDE for it... after I got a job though, kept up with it... but SharpDevelop worked for me for the most part in the earlier years.

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

#237

Post by tracker1 »

voltagex_ wrote: post #216
exdsq wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d recommend checking out .NET Core and F# or C# 8. Honestly .NET is becoming my go-to for anything beyond what a bash script can offer because it’s typed, functional or OO, has great frameworks for basic MVC sites or desktop apps, and the IDE on Windows is amazing while being able to compile cross-platform. It’s not just for enterprises!

The only thing that really shits me with .NET Core is that their idea of a "single executable" deployment is really a self-extracting zip file with an entire copy of the runtime.

These days many of my deploy targets are docker images anyway, so not as much an issue... though looking at Rust with great interest.

For anything less, I reach for Node first, only because I can get something done faster.

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

#239

Post by AgentME »

wwright wrote: post #99
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…

This is where Kubernetes points, FWIW :)

My favorite way to picture Kubernetes is to think of it as a distributed operating system. It generally happens to be run across Linux hosts and is used to run Linux containers, but the Linux parts are incidental, like the specific model of CPU in a desktop system. The Linux parts aren't core to Kubernetes' abstractions, and it's possible that Kubernetes could add support for hosts and container runtimes that aren't Linux but instead platforms more streamlined for Kubernetes usage without historical baggage.

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

#240

Post by tracker1 »

josteink wrote: post #69
sitkack wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Microsoft officially support SQL Server on Linux and Docker now: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-downlo... No need for emulation.

The docker images have been great... can spin up a fresh install and deploy schema and config in a couple minutes for local development.
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