[HN Gopher] Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure - over 50 p...
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Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure - over 50 percent of VM
cores
Author : crpietschmann
Score : 70 points
Date : 2020-05-12 16:52 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (build5nines.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (build5nines.com)
| ogre_codes wrote:
| Is this surprising to anyone? Microsoft has been competing head-
| to-head with AWS as a VM/ cloud provider for quite a while now
| and Linux is by far the largest platform people deploy to.
|
| I know there is some demand for Windows VMs in the enterprise,
| but even that seems to be shrinking.
| whoisjuan wrote:
| I found it funny when in Azure you create a resource and you can
| pick between Windows and Linux for the host and Windows is the
| default option... like bro, I'm not gonna run my shit on Windows
| walled and heavily licensed garden. What if tomorrow I have to
| migrate my stuff somewhere else. Are you crazy?
|
| P.S: I know there are legitimate reasons for running something on
| Windows but for any generic project that shouldn't be the default
| at all. Linux is the de facto cloud OS.
| azinman2 wrote:
| You know you're suggesting it's crazy that Microsoft would
| suggest their own OS as the default, right?
| whoisjuan wrote:
| Wouldn't be crazy if Windows wasn't a licensed closed source
| OS, but that's exactly what it is. That's the definition of
| vendor lock.
| freefriedrice wrote:
| I've been working with Linux and BSD for so long, I don't even
| know of any Microsoft-only cloud applications. I'm completely
| *nix bubbled. I cannot imagine cloud programming on windows,
| probably because I only write user-space native apps. Is there
| a Puppet or Ansible for windows? I'd be completely lost.
| rbanffy wrote:
| 50%?! That's surprisingly low.
| outside1234 wrote:
| It is more that the percentage of workloads that are running
| Windows that are hosted on Azure (vs. GCP or Amazon) is very
| high.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Which is, in turn, because Azure provides an unusually good
| deal for Windows users -- free Windows licenses for VM
| guests, Active Directory integration...
| angry_octet wrote:
| I would like to know what percentage of those core hours are
| servers (Windows Svr, Nano vs Unix) vs desktops (Azure
| virtual desktop). I know there has been a huge scale up in
| cloud desktops in the last few months.
| babarock wrote:
| Between this and their Azure Sphere product, Microsoft may very
| well be the largest Linux vendor today.
|
| As someone who discovered Unix in the early 00s, this makes me
| chuckle. What a world!
| Random_ernest wrote:
| AWS has roughly double the market shared. So it is very likely
| that they take that title.
| https://www.parkmycloud.com/blog/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-clou...
| enitihas wrote:
| Yup, plus Azure had some 40-50% VMs running Windows IIRC, so
| unlikely to be running more linux than AWS.
| ch_123 wrote:
| They were possibly the largest Unix vendor in the 80s:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix
| angry_octet wrote:
| Define "largest" in the right way and that might be true, as
| the market was very fragmented, but certainly not in terms of
| market share.
| enitihas wrote:
| I doubt they would be larger than AWS, specially for Linux.
| close04 wrote:
| Between Azure and WSL Microsoft might be shipping more Linux
| kernels than any other company out there.
| greggyb wrote:
| Do you think WSL counts if not enabled?
| Wohlf wrote:
| Optional OS features are stored in WinSxS in case users
| decide to enable them, so technically they are shipping the
| Linux kernel with all recent pro/enterprise installs.
| flatiron wrote:
| more than android? a year ago there were 2.5 billion active
| android devices, that's a bunch of linux kernels!
|
| [edit] not to mention chromebooks and i would assume most of
| their consumer products (chromecasts, etc.)
| axaxs wrote:
| GCP and the little project called 'Android' would probably
| make Google the leader, by far.
| tombert wrote:
| 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 support and ZeroMQ's Windows support doesn't support IPC
| sockets. Hell, in the little bit of testing that I've done with
| this, .NET Core is _faster_ on Linux than Windows.
|
| This isn't to say Windows is "bad". I'm personally not a fan but
| plenty of smart people I know like Windows better than Linux.
| It's just to say that, for the domain that Azure fills, Linux is
| often a better fit, and if MS wants to compete with AWS, it would
| be borderline-idiotic not to support Linux.
| GordonS wrote:
| I've used Windows on desktop since 3.1, and nowadays Windows 10
| is my daily driver - IMO it's the best desktop OS, and always
| has been.
|
| But for servers, I much prefer Linux. It uses less resources,
| and it's so much easier to get it into a known and consistent
| state that Windows.
|
| Also, something about having a GUI for servers has always
| felt... wrong somehow!
| rhacker wrote:
| 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 Studio, and production deployments are: RDP in, stopping
| with the little red button, updating the codebase (with a copy
| over a network share), and then re-running the code on the
| production server with the little green play button. Database
| changes are done by hand in SQL Server Manager.
|
| I know this isn't at all related to the post here - but it's
| just an interesting phenomenon - the fact that Azure is about
| 50 percent windows means it's mostly running things like Office
| backend products, crazy running copies of Visual Studio. It is
| probably a total mess if half of Azure goes down for 5 minutes.
| Linux servers would come back up and continue running whatever.
| All the Windows companies get a call, have to RDP in and do
| shit.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| I'm one "visual studio Dev"
|
| I have also build in Go, nodejs, Php, RoR.
|
| But VS is truelly the best IDE experience I have witnessed.
|
| Database changes are automatically migrated and deployed
| using entity framework fyi.
|
| The big deployment button changes the connection string per
| deployment, deploys with feature flags directly and
| automatically migrates the db to the latest version
| GordonS wrote:
| > 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.
|
| That might have been true once, but I think Microsoft-stack
| devs are a lot more command line savvy these days.
|
| The move towards DevOps and scripting makes the command line
| much more necessary, and makes the benefits of the command
| line clear. The move towards cloud has introduced Linux to a
| lot more organisations, yes, even Microsoft shops.
| stinos wrote:
| _I 've always got the feeling that MS specific developers are
| highly visual studio oriented_
|
| This and the rest of your post is about one specific kind of
| developer, and I honestly wonder how you can think that's
| it.. Lack of experience or just bad luck and only ever met
| this kind perhaps? Anyway while I know for a fact these
| exist, your feeling is sort of wrong in that there are also
| developers who just use VS as the IDE it is (to write code
| and debug; it's good at that) and for the rest automate build
| environment setup, deployment and whatnot just like you'd do
| on another OS. I just don't know the numbers, i.e. which
| share of developers using VS act like you describe. It's not
| like using VS somehow makes people blind for concepts like
| CI. Data point: we have a bunch of scripts (combination of
| PowerShell/Python/MSbuild) which will install and setup the
| complete build environment from scratch
| (VS/Miniconda3/Vcpkg/...) checkout all code (yes from git,
| not from a network share), build a myriad of different
| flavors of the product, package it; all in one commandline
| command.
| shawxe wrote:
| Obviously anecdotal, but in my personal experience this is
| pretty close to the truth.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| 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
| code_duck wrote:
| It just makes sense to run a server OS that works well and is
| full-featured when there is no GUI.
| tombert wrote:
| You know, I was thinking this, but honestly how much overhead
| is the Windows GUI when no one is logged into it? I know it's
| not nothing, but I suspect it's not _that_ much, is it?
| eitland wrote:
| > in the little bit of testing that I've done with this, .NET
| Core is faster on Linux than Windows.
|
| My experience as well. In fact it was extremely much faster.
|
| - Hello world took something like 5 seconds to run on Windows
|
| - on Linux (a VM on the exact same laptop, with the same
| Windows running underneath in fact) it was so fast I had to use
| the time command to figure out how many milliseconds it took
| :-)
|
| FTR: while it was hardly scientific I actually put some effort
| into trying to make sure it was equal.
| jfkebwjsbx wrote:
| That does not make sense at all. The files were probably
| cached in the Linux case.
| eitland wrote:
| Believe me I tried a number of things. It was like that
| from the first run and every time.
|
| Well, technically it might have used 700ms the first time
| and 400ms later, I didn't measure the first run, but it was
| still _way_ faster than on Windows which was why I started
| measuring using time after all.
|
| Also on Windows it kept being slow on subsequent runs, and
| in my world that matters too.
|
| I don't have recordings, but I recommend you try for
| yourself. I compiled both from the same source, and as far
| as I can remember I used standalone compilation for both (I
| don't have perfect memory but I have a history of being
| careful.)
| freefriedrice wrote:
| 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 of multiple users didn't appear until Win3.1 for
| workgroups, decades after multiuser OSes. WinNT started to take
| protected mode seriously, but they re-invented networking from
| an MS perspective (e.g., POP/SNMP? nope: MSExchange).
|
| It's not a surprise that Windows is such a mess under the hood
| compared to Linux/BSD/Unix/SystemV when you look at the history
| of Windows. I dunno, maybe that's not fair, but switching
| between *nux and Windows from a networking / distributed
| computing perspective is jarring. And that's just for simple
| things (interface config, tracing, configuration of multiple
| adapters and bridges...)
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _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.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| I have to wonder what percentage of the Windows 10 codebase
| is for backwards compatibility.
| jamieweb wrote:
| 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 the open-source world, because there is such little demand for
| it by individuals.
|
| The wackiest one I've come across is a CMS (Crematorium
| Management System). If anyone wants to create an open-source one
| with me, please get in touch...!
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Other than bespoke enterprise apps, my guess would be the
| majority of the remaining Windows machines run SQL server.
| cameronbrown wrote:
| Virtual desktops or straight up on-prem to cloud migration
| might be my guess. If big companies can avoid it, why pay the
| cost of a rewrite?
|
| > Crematorium Management System
|
| Genuine question: why can't you use Microsoft Access or G Suite
| for this? Seems like the canonical data entry use case these
| products are designed for.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| I don't have actual numbers obviously, but I'd imagine that a
| lot of Xbox multiplayer game backends and probably all of Xbox
| Live is running on Azure Windows servers, and Xbox is a pretty
| big platform by number of users.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/11/microsoft-wants-azur...
|
| https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/gaming/
| GordonS wrote:
| Microsoft uses Windows behind the scenes on a lot of their
| managed services, but specifically for VMs on Azure... I'm as
| clueless as you (and I say that as someone who work in the
| enterprise space for mostly Microsoft shops).
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