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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

#301

Post by genocidicbunny »

HeadsUpHigh wrote: post #275
StillBored wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

No way around using windows as a private medical practice. Too much bespoke software.

Yep. I don't think I've ever seen a computer at any of the healthcare services I've used that wasn't either ancient and running some really old bespoke software, or wasn't some flavour of Windows running slightly less old bespoke software.

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

#302

Post by I_am_tiberius »

mekster wrote: post #295
I_am_tiberius wrote: post #171

I had to move from Digital Ocean to Azure recently because my customers didn't know DO and thought they can't trust them. I was super happy with DO though. Azure is the ridiculously expensive without bringing any benefit. Sure, there are client tools but I don't need them. It seems to me every click I do on the Azure portal makes the costs increase by a few euros. I wish Digital Ocean would be accepted by more corpor…

Not just expensive but the Azure web interface is a huge maze that I cannot even simply find out last month's cost breakdown in minutes. That was so much like Windows messed up UI, it wasn't funny.

Yes, fun is something else.

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

#303

Post by luckylion »

freehunter wrote: post #145
luckylion wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 craz…

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

If you're trying to serve a mass market? I think it is. Wasting time (yours + the customer's) by making them go through and deny the less common options isn't a good idea if you're aiming for serving as many people as possible as efficiently as possible. This would be very different if it wasn't Azure but some local tech company that sits down with you to talk about what kind of server you need and want, what OS best fits your requirements etc, but that's a very different game from what Microsoft is playing with Azure.

With low/self-service, streamlining the process is the right thing to do. In the end, you have to ask yourself, whether you want to earn a few bucks by also selling a licence to your OS, or whether you want more customers. Of course, it's not an actual issue in this case, because you'll usually not manually provision (but then again: why do it if you don't expect to make money by doing it?)

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

#304

Post by jedieaston »

kryogen1c wrote: post #181
jedieaston wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those workloads should be moved to Intune, it's a heck of a lot cheaper for SMBs ($20 for Windows+Office 365+Intune) and not hard to set up. You probably shouldn't be spinning up a new AD forest unless you have an app that needs it, cloud directories are pretty much fine.

...what? isnt intune an MDM platform? regardless, there are some pretty sizable monthly costs when you already own the competing infrastructure - "$20 for Windows+Office 365+Intune" is not accurate. are you referring to azure AD? thats basically what i said originally - on-prem deployments are being replaced by cloud infrastructure. the point is that its a windows architecture, which is what the person i was replying…

Sorry, I meant $20 per user per month.

But it should be cheaper when it comes to refresh time (for your on-prem AD), unless you have to pony up for Enterprise (for compliance and enhanced MFA, which is more like 40 dollars per month), or if you have software which relies on on-prem AD. And Intune manages Windows systems using a combination of MDM profiles and GPO (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/configuration/ad...).

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

#305

Post by mroche »

dmw_ng wrote: post #251
mroche wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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) w…

It's different for those of us in Anim/VFX. Windows poses a serious business cost, not from licensing, software, or administration. The vast majority of images these days are still rendered with CPU engines. Windows incurs a 15-30% time increase per frame compared to using Linux or macOS. When your frames take on average an hour minimum to over 24 hours, with thousands of frames to render, that adds up significantly in terms of iteration, directorial changes, and making deadlines.

Once you get beyond small teams doing the work, this starts to play in massively. Pretty much all medium+ sized studios have their artist pipeline on Linux, reserving Windows or macOS for tools like Adobe, ZBrush or Marvelous Designer that don't have a Linux build yet. And where I'm at, the operating system itself doesn't even matter to the artists. All they need to know is "this button opens terminal, this command puts me in the right show, this command launches the hub" and from there they're in our GUI pipeline. Their environment is the DCC, not the OS. For all intents and purposes it's completely abstracted away from them.

That's not to say there aren't those that take advantage, creating custom commands and utilities to share with others. But for the most part the fact that it's not Windows or macOS doesn't bother them.

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

#306

Post by pnutjam »

bfrog wrote: post #93
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…

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.

Try OpenSUSE, it has a more recent kernel then RH, it's still rock solid, and it has a great community.

Aside from breaking stuff all the time, Ubuntu seems to have wide swings in the quality of documentation.

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

#307

Post by pnutjam »

freefriedrice wrote: post #137
dijit wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not if you stick with Suse (OpenSUSE) or RedHat (centOS).

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

#308

Post by pnutjam »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #101
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…

Yep, many years ago I casually stated here that Windows was clumsy on the network, and it really offended some guy. Limited drive letters and backslashes didn’t help, but the history you mentioned is the foundational problem. The misdesign around console/remote admin is another. For more background read the Art of Unix programming and the Windows Terminal blog about all the layers they had to work around to shoehorn…

I still run into Windows Admins who don't understand UNC paths vs mapped drives.

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

#309

Post by pnutjam »

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…

I came from the Windows world to Linux. Especially when it comes to Enterprise, my experience is that Windows Admins are more likely to know network basics then Linux admins.

However, Linux admins who know networking usually have a deeper understanding.

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

#310

Post by mroche »

RyanGoosling wrote: post #267
dmw_ng wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) w…

Yes. I know Windows inside and out. I can easily navigate the UI. It does the job I need it to. I don’t want to spend my time inefficiently by toiling around in a Linux console due to some strange affinity towards Linux. I have a job to do and Windows is an effective tool I know and can use to execute the job.

If you're going solo or as part of a small team it makes sense. If you have a team that can abstract that away from your so you only have to worry about your work, then whether or not you know the OS itself means nothing. We can bypass the terminal altogether if we wanted, it has nothing to do with personal wishes or desires and everything to do with maximum performance and how the industry (film/anim/vfx) evolved.
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