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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

#201

Post by freefriedrice »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #134
freefriedrice wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of Linux's many great failings: it constantly seeks to reinvent the wheel. Unfortunately modern Microsoft is also suffering from this terrible affliction.

On the one hand I like seeing behavioral trends feed back into the software. On the other hand, there needs to be tighter acceptance standards, and more effort to minimize the disruption to established rules. That's probably much harder to do on Linux than BSD (windows & macos have no excuse, they control everything!). Linus T. really exemplifies that with the KERNEL, it is the OS that is suffering.

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

#202

Post by freefriedrice »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #92
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…

It moves around as well. There's a huge distinction between Linux _as a kernel_ and "Linux" _as an operating system_. The kernel has the same layout across all the distributions / operating systems, but everything else is up to the particular stack that distro chose. Gentoo is different from Redhat which is different from Debian, etc. You can do what you describe without changing the kernel, but you would need to mod…

Yes, that is an important distinction I glossed over. Thanks for adding that.

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

#203

Post by gardnr »

At a startup back in 2017, we received a substantial amount of free Azure credit through the their innovation program. At the time, there was no way to run postgres with guaranteed iops. You had to run SQL server to get guaranteed iops.

We ended up deploying to AWS instead.

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

#204

Post by gorgoiler »

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 can usually be beaten hard enough with a hammer to turn it into something useful in a specific domain.

We make pens and paper and do all sorts of specific business with these generic tools. Encouraging the generic use of computers might seem like dragging us back to the 1980s, but it’s how these tools were meant to be used!

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

#205

Post by throwaway888abc »

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…

Legacy sharepoint ?

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

#206

Post by int_19h »

kylemuir wrote: post #129
scarface74 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to pay for anything to learn the Microsoft stack. - Visual Studio Community Edition is full featured and free - SQL Server Express is free - You really don't need IIS but it is free. With C# you can run on top of Kestral.

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 took a while to appear. Back when .NET first appeared, the only thing that was free was the .NET Framework itself (including command line compilers), and online MSDN documentation. Eventually, we got SharpDevelop.

But, well, there's free, and then there's free. In my home country, you could buy a bundle of CDs with complete VS 2002 + MSDN distribution on the black market for around $20. Which was still expensive for students, mind you - so the same bundle was then shared around the class (including the teachers, who only had an older bundle of VS6).

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

#207

Post by int_19h »

oneplane wrote: post #60
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " Windows came from the single-user domain. Unix came from server space. " Windows 9x came from the single-user domain but is long dead except for compatibility stuff left over in modern Windows. Windows NT and its successors came from server space from its VMS lineage.

While that is true, the win32 API and other stuff that floats on top of NT for the GUI based stuff (which is most stuff) is still very much restricted by that legacy. NT was supposed to be very tunable and modular and have multiple personalities and abstractions but it turns out it mostly is just win32-on-NT and everything else ended up being on top of win32. It has gotten better, especially post-OneCore, but it stil…

Can you give any examples of Win32 API that manifest design flaws or restrictions due to "single-user domain" legacy?

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

#208

Post by int_19h »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #186
tombert wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, not to mention that you're allowed to add features to it without waiting for Microsoft to do it. Linux might not be the best codebase in the world, but it's probably easier to add a feature to Linux than it is to get MS to add a new feature. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Linux quicker to support multithreading than Windows, largely because big megacorps needed that for their servers?

> " Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Linux quicker to support multithreading than Windows, largely because big megacorps needed that for their servers? " Surely you jest. The other Unixes, including Microsoft Xenix, supported multithreading before either Windows NT or Linux even existed. Big megacorps in that era used Sun Microsystems (" The com in dotcom™ ") server and other proprietary Unix servers because both…

Linux didn't have real threads early on tho, didn't it? LinuxThreads were only introduced in 1996, and they were broken in many ways.

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

#209

Post by balnaphone »

tw04 wrote: post #175
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…

SQL? There are literally millions of production SQL databases out there and custom apps built on top of them - and while MS may have created a Linux port, there's no planet on which the average enterprise is moving to SQL on Linux without VERY good reason (and there currently isn't one that I can see outweighing the risk).

A company I consult for specializes in SQL Server applications. There is a significant push to Linux from both the largest customers, paying over 150k$/month for server licensing and hosting, and from the smallest companies, who are severely budget-conscious. The big customers have teams fluent in both Linux and Windows, and the smallest outsource their DBAs and sysadmins, so in both cases the cost is mostly a one-time development cost and maintenance goes on as usual.

The medium-sized enterprises (100MM$ to 500MM$ annual revenue) are the ones who aren't looking at Linux. These are the ones with in-house tech support, who only know Windows. Maybe they are the average customers that won't switch over?

Note that I'm only talking about cloud-hosted SQL Server installations. When you're buying the whole infrastructure stack, it's a different story. Also, this isn't the area I specialize in, so this is just a narrow observation, not a broad pattern.

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

#210

Post by int_19h »

tombert wrote: post #87
stinos wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

socketing stuff will help abstract it, but Unix sockets are simply better out of the box Can you elaborate? Do you mean performance? Because the on the C level both use (apart from some minor differences, which aren't enough to call one 'simply better' than the other) the same berkeley socket API.

Again, haven't touched Windows in years so it's entirely possible that I'm wrong or out of date, but the last time I did any kind of networking on Windows was with the WinSock API, which if I recall correctly, didn't have any support for any kind of IPC out of the box, and I had to do everything with TCP. I might have been too harsh on Windows there, I've never paid to do any direct socket-level programming within Wi…

Do you mean Unix domain sockets by "IPC"? TCP sockets are also a perfectly valid IPC mechanism, as are many others. Win32 generally promotes pipes (named, if needed) for this purpose. For sockets, if you insist on them, it offers some optimizations for local/local TCP connections. Win10 eventually added Unix sockets, mostly for WSL integration (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/af_unix-comes-to-...). In the end, it's all just byte streams, so it doesn't matter much once you get past establishing connection.

The biggest annoyance with Windows sockets is that they aren't really unified with files - as in, a socket file descriptor cannot be passed to file APIs that work on FDs, like read() and write(); you have to use send/recv(). This makes it harder to write generic code in C, since you need an abstraction layer for code that deals with I/O streams. But most frameworks already offer such an abstraction layer - e.g. a .NET API would just use Stream (and if it's a socket, it would be a NetworkStream instance).

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