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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

#251

Post by dmw_ng »

mroche wrote: post #245
dmw_ng wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I imagine things like render farms or other specialist graphics work Eh... outside of the broadcast motion graphics group, small personal/business farms, or educational institutions this is largely a majority Linux area.* *I'm speaking from the perspective of public cloud farms and the feature film industry (for VFX and Anim). You can't escape Windows for select software and plugins, but if it's not a strict requir…

It's the same as infrastructure and server side.. from my corner I see a limited horizon over which little exists and only a few things over there might use Windows. Think of any industry: the first for whatever reason that came to mind was architecture. Lots of firms on ArchiCAD and that'll never change, there's no reason to. The value is not the tool or the platform underlying it, or anything else an Engineer(tm) will understand, the value is all in the buildings costing 1000x more than the 'tiny windows utility' that just happens to contribute to the result, kinda like QuickBooks or calc.exe.

It's a bunch of actual people designing buildings that cost so much more than a Windows license doing Real Things that have some lingua franca interface that has no reason to go Linux and probably never will, because in that business they're too busy with actual priorities to ever even discuss how the status quo could change. There are 10,000 industries like this, and probably 10,000 people to each of those who simply don't care, because to them the computer is and will remain only a tool. That's the world of Windows we can't see.

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

#252

Post by int_19h »

code_duck wrote: post #196
cesarb wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RegEdit, is there a text version for that? AFAIK, yes, it's at %WINDIR%\System32\reg.exe

So it exists, but is the usability and functionality nearly equivalent? And the thing is that it also involves third-party software tools.

Nearly equivalent to what? It can do everything that the GUI can, if that's what you mean. Some things are obviously going to be less convenient, but that's just the nature of CLI.

And what third party tools does that involve?

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

#253

Post by StillBored »

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…

I think its a SMB thing. Basically windows owns organizations with less than 10-30 people. And there are a _LOT_ of those, and they do a _LOT_ of custom development for their little specialization. Its the excel sheets that grow into full blown applications, or the vm.net one off utilities someone hacked together that grow into the backbone of a thriving small business. Even the generic catagory SMBs (dentists, car repair, etc) end up mostly being windows shops because the owner gets quickbooks or whatever and runs the whole thing from a windows pc in the office.

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

#254

Post by FridgeSeal »

rhacker wrote: post #19
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 always got the feeling that MS specific developers are highly visual studio oriented. They have their connection string built into the IDE. In fact, if you asked them to make something that builds from the command line, and runs, they would probably be scratching their head for a while. It wouldn't surprise me at all to find some windows based companies that have classic windows VMs in the cloud, running Visual…

> In fact, if you asked them to make something that builds from the command line, and runs, they would probably be scratching their head for a while.

As someone who learnt to program using linux/Mac OS, when I got a job somewhere that used windows and VS exclusively, trying to get my head around the (to me) needlessly confusing and convoluted way in which windows-dotnet devs seemed to do things was a painful experience.

Watching some of them try and debug docker files was amusing because that was a total role reversal.

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

#255

Post by jandrese »

koffiezet wrote: post #235
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 absolut…

Which provider is best often comes down to your use case. Do you need tons of memory? Lots of disk I/O? Network bandwidth? Huge amounts of CPU? GPU cores? Pricing can vary a fair bit depending on the details of your workload.

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

#256

Post by int_19h »

whb07 wrote: post #70
dijit wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in a bit of an odd place here, but we develop C++ on Windows (both client and server software). You'd think that C++ would be relatively portable (though not as portable as Java), but you'd be mistaken. So many things are not portable.

I actually was writing C and lo and behold MSFT has a 16 byte char as their default. lol tchar

TCHAR is a Win9x relic hasn't really been something to be concerned with for well over a decade now. It took a while for MSDN to acknowledge that, but these days it even documents the A/W versions of each struct and function explicitly, and doesn't mention the generic aliases.

But wchar_t is still 16-bit, yes - it's baked into the ABI for good now. It's not even a "default", since you can't change it.

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

#257

Post by int_19h »

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.

Because you already use it for Office 365, for example.

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

#258

Post by Arelius »

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…

I use a lot of Windows machines in the cloud as build machines for video games.

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

#260

Post by fomine3 »

tomc1985 wrote: post #40
rhacker wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always got the feeling that MS specific developers are highly visual studio oriented. They have their connection string built into the IDE. In fact, if you asked them to make something that builds from the command line, and runs, they would probably be scratching their head for a while. It wouldn't surprise me at all to find some windows based companies that have classic windows VMs in the cloud, running Visual…

Is it any better than SSH'ing into a server and "services stop mybusinessapp; update.sh; services start mybusinessapp"? I'm detecting a bit of disdain for the VS world

manual ssh operation looks not better
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