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Microsoft Announces Nano Server

blogs.technet.com

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Re: Microsoft Announces Nano Server

#101

Post by MichaelGG »

Elepsis wrote: post #100
MichaelGG wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is super friendly to startups. I can't say details, but they've given us a ton of support. BizSpark Plus ($5K a month free Azure for a year) is great. They've also got marketing help available. While Azure is overpriced compared to Google Cloud (and maybe compared to AWS - dunno cause AWS pricing is convoluted), having them comp it is really nice. Azure is also a lot more full service than Google's stuff, i…

Just curious--I thought all three platforms were committed to essentially matching each other's prices. Has that not been true in your experience? Or is it something specific that's driving up your perceived price of Azure versus the other options?

No, that's trivially untrue, just go try the pricing calculators.

They make a big deal about being the same price on storage and bandwidth. We talked to MS and determined that even after discounts for committing to Azure, the VMs themselves are 50% more than on Google. Without a commit, the price is 200% of Google's.

And even on storage, Azure isn't competitive, even if the price is the same. Their SSD options that are available now are laughable. (A temp SSD drive that erases on reboot - mostly useless.) Their currently-in-preview SSD option is ... awkward and just plain weird. You have to use special VM instance types, then create special storage accounts, then select from 3 presets in terms of space/perf. Azure actually suggests software striping them together to get more perf.

Google's SSD offering is straightfoward and just works and is quite fast. Want more perf? Just get a bigger disk and they scale up the IOPS, no problem, no fuss, no special VM or anything needed.

I'm sort of an MS fanboy, and I really dislike and distrust Google. But after using GCE a little bit, wow, for IaaS I wouldn't ever choose anything else. Everything seems just simpler, easier, cheaper, faster. (Machines boot super quick, the portal is simple/fast, and they have an SSH client in browser as a kicker.)

Re: Microsoft Announces Nano Server

#102

Post by CRidge »

mattbillenstein wrote: post #43

What is the use-case for this? Modern Linux distros have all the tooling, libraries, utilities already - is the idea to use this for hosting .Net stuff?

With micro service architecture being one of the big buzz words at the moment, I see this as a great way to separate individual micro services (with some clever routing in front). Using Nano would make these services separate and easy to update without affecting eachother. Continous delivery FTW :-)

Re: Microsoft Announces Nano Server

#103

Post by oblio »

jdub wrote: post #94
deevus wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PowerShell Server "gives users the power to securely manage Windows remotely through PowerShell from any standard SSH client"

Or you can just run OpenSSH (there are a few nicely packaged versions of it available for Windows) and use PowerShell as the shell. :-)

You can't. At least you couldn't the last time I tried. Powershell hangs in SSH.

Re: Microsoft Announces Nano Server

#104

Post by chebum »

MichaelGG wrote: post #81

My real concern is that figuring out so many things without the GUI is currently a real PITA. Like trying to make IIS act as a reverse proxy. It's a huge pain, and most of the docs are telling you to click various things. Compared to setting up nginx, ouch. Compounding things is the fact that MS took a cover-our-ass policy to installing things, so even after installing IIS, you've gotta go explicitly install "dynamic…

IIS management is done via WMI which will work for this version of Windows Server: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj635848.aspx

Re: Microsoft Announces Nano Server

#105

Post by chebum »

The main question is pricing. If it will be cheap or free (who knows?), it will be an option for hosting micro-services on myriad of VPSes. A probably a resurrection of interest for ASP.NET framework.

Re: Microsoft Announces Nano Server

#106

Post by newuser88273 »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #90
MichaelGG wrote: post #81

My real concern is that figuring out so many things without the GUI is currently a real PITA. Like trying to make IIS act as a reverse proxy. It's a huge pain, and most of the docs are telling you to click various things. Compared to setting up nginx, ouch. Compounding things is the fact that MS took a cover-our-ass policy to installing things, so even after installing IIS, you've gotta go explicitly install "dynamic…

Windows has always been super-visual. For many tasks there isn't even a CLI way to do it short of editing the registry.

The registry is not very discoverable. However, once you discovered, a lot of customization can be had from running as little as a single registry script.

As a trivial example, remapping caps-lock to something sane was easier on the last few windows releases I tried (just run a registry script) than on any of the 'nixes I used in the same time period.

Re: Microsoft Announces Nano Server

#108

Post by dragontamer »

tracker1 wrote: post #67
emn13 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not too confident powershell is really good enough to compete with the ancient unix shell. I've tried using it to automate windows machines, but it's certainly not a smooth experience. Part of that is the lack of a history of automation - basic things to do with processes and I/O are kind of schizophrenic. All of the basics are clearly unix inspired (standard streams, processes, redirection - this is all unix-lik…

Agreed on most of your points... PowerShell is by far the most powerful shell I've ever worked with on any platform... that said, I don't like it. It's very verbose. As a JS guy, these days most of my scripts run via node/iojs and are as platform agnostic as possible. More and more I know it only needs to run in linux, or is guiding dockerization. Even then, bash scripts tend to be easier to reason about.

You could always write JScript. Ha ha ha!

http://blog.idleworx.com/2010/01/windows-scripting-host-and-...

I've seen a few open-source projects actually use this. (IIRC, it was WiX)

Re: Microsoft Announces Nano Server

#110

Post by gbog »

MichaelGG wrote: post #81

My real concern is that figuring out so many things without the GUI is currently a real PITA. Like trying to make IIS act as a reverse proxy. It's a huge pain, and most of the docs are telling you to click various things. Compared to setting up nginx, ouch. Compounding things is the fact that MS took a cover-our-ass policy to installing things, so even after installing IIS, you've gotta go explicitly install "dynamic…

> I don't have a fundamental objection to Windows

I do. I have a fundamental objection to MicroSoft too. I do not know why people forget that MS actually tried very hard to make internet just a special button in MS Word. How they fought against anything looking like an open communication protocol. This is a sin, the kind of sin that shall not be forgiven. I respect Mr Gates being a generous guy in his old age, but he led a company that did and still do a lot of harm to almost all industries over the world.

Be reminded that Windows is still the dominant OS by very very far. Almost everyone on earth working on a desk uses MS Windows, Word, IE and Excel. This is not a sane distribution of powers.

What would we say if 98% of the oil and the gaz stations on earth were operated by the same company? We are living in this Orwellian world, where one company drives 98% of the computers and their major softwares in the world.

Why are we so fast to forget that?

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