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Heavy Windows server user here. We have 100+ windows server 2008 R2 and 2012 R2 machines in production and a massive .Net/C# codebase. Currently it's a complet
by buffoon 11y ago
Heavy Windows server user here. We have 100+ windows server 2008 R2 and 2012 R2 machines in production and a massive .Net/C# codebase.
Currently it's a complete bastard of an operating system. It's expensive, hard to manage even with powershell and DSC etc, difficult to update, difficult to provision, complicated and to be honest absolutely terrible licensing hell that costs us days a year. Hyper-V just adds complexity before anyone suggests that.
Exchange on-site deployments are dead. Everyone is moving away from them now and into Office 365 and Google Apps. There is no rational cost justification to use anything else now. Even the big orgs (5000+ staff) are moving off it as it's cheaper to get a fat pipe in than it is to keep 2-3 windows admins and a pile of kit and a SAN on the payroll just to run groupware.
Biztalk is also dead and has been for a few years. People who were using it heavily seem to be holding onto it due to cost reasons and everyone else who has been using it and have done any platform re-engineering have moved off to Windows Server AppFabric, NServiceBus and custom integrations or to AWS/SQS.
Microsoft are pushing Windows Server 2016 with container support as the up and coming new thing. I'm really not interested in this myself. I don't think anyone else is either other than a select number of core windows bloggers. It's simply a "me too" move.
As we re-engineer our application, what our endgame currently looks like is deploying disposable Linux VMs (CentOS) on AWS running ASP.Net 5/golang, microservices, lots of small PostgreSQL nodes (RDS) rather than massive 48 core SQL Server boxes, using OAuth2/OpenID authentication and getting rid of our extensive operations team who are incidentally more of an obstruction than an aid to the organisation.
IMHO Windows Server is probably circling the drain. There are very few places it fits in a modern business and this is only going to get worse going forth as well.
The remaining killer is Active Directory but you can already get Microsoft to deal with that for you on Azure, pre-integrated with Office 365 and sharepoint etc.
Microsoft I suspect will end up a services company like Google with some hardware being sold on the side. And you know what? That's fine.
- frik 11y agoThe plan for the original Active Directory was to be the directory service of a Microsoft dominated "information highway" called "The Microsoft Network" (v1). see the infamous Microsoft memo from Bill Gates It seems they have big plans for their cloud product "Azure"
- frik 11y agoIt's true, read the memo (1994): http://www.microsoft.com/about/companyinformation/timeline/timeline/docs/di_killerapp_InternetMemo.rtf http://www.microsoft.com/about/companyinformation/timeline/t...
- buffoon 11y agoIt is. I don't know why you were downvoted. Strangely that document makes me want NT 3.51 back again as well :)
- Ruxbin 11y agoYou're right in that Windows is complex operating system but how is it any different than CentOS? Sure, Powershell/DSC does make life easier but how are these utilities necessarily any worse or better than a combination of bash, python, kickstart? Exchange Onsite deployments aren't dead, on-site email is dead. Unless, you're "too big" for the cloud (>20k users) because of <$Requirement> then Exchange is an option. Keeping data On-Premise has always been a challenge, SAN are expensive but that's what it takes if you want data locally. I can't comment on the rest but we're comparing Apples to Oranges here.
- noir_lord 11y ago> Microsoft I suspect will end up a services company like Google with some hardware being sold on the side. And you know what? That's fine. This seems to be one of the patterns for large enterprise software companies, IBM did it as well. It would be interesting to see what Microsoft could do with Linux on the desktop if they swung their weight behind it, Microsoft has incredible engineering resources and some amazing programmers, I doubt it would happen but it would be fascinating.
- x5n1 11y agoWhich begs the question which CIO made that technology choice? He should be fired!
- buffoon 11y ago12 years ago it made sense. It's all legacy now.
- MichaelGG 11y agoAn even simpler summary: To add SPDY or HTTP/2 support to IIS, you must upgrade the operating system. I understand why this is (http.sys) but ... wow. Whereas using nginx I literally add "spdy" to the config and presto, double-digit% improvement on my site.
- buffoon 11y agoYes exactly that sort of shit is what we have to deal with! http.sys is a giant fucking turd. That and the whole urlacl thing. Nothing but pain. They added it because of shitty performance in the NT kernel when serving HTTP from userspace and it turned into a friction point for the whole operating system.
- merb 11y agoThe question is why is the userspace so shitty? Doesn't Microsoft implement some async things into their kernel? Or stuff like epoll, kqueue, etc..?
- buffoon 11y agoNT syscall overhead is immense compared to a Unix derivative. There are layers galore.
- Skunkleton 11y agoI am not an NT guy so maybe this is off, but doesn't windows support overlapped IO? To my understanding it is a socket only version of epoll.
- junto 11y agoIf you are struggling/fighting with the large deployments, I recommend you have a chat with http://www.devopsguys.com/ http://www.devopsguys.com/ down in Cardiff, UK. That's all they do (and well). Speak to Jim and tell them @Junto sent you.
- buffoon 11y agoThanks for the reference. They're not for this platform as we've already nailed down what we're doing but will keep them in my notes for future projects.
- kyberias 11y ago"Have moved off to Windows Server AppFabric" Doesn't really sound you know what you're talking about. That technology is dead and doesn't really replace BizTalk. "In April 2015 Microsoft announced that it will end support for AppFabric for Windows Server on the 2nd April 2016."
- buffoon 11y agoI know exactly what I'm talking about and am aware of the deprecation. I'm talking historically i.e. when people wanted managed long-running workflow hosting, monitoring and WCF correlation on the cheap instead of fishing out for Biztalk orchestration style integrations and licenses they jumped on that bandwagon. People are stuck with it now, deprecation or not.
- breakingcups 11y agoWow, I'm currently making nearly the exact same switch, albeit on a smaller scale. I'm currently in charge of a lot of old ASP.NET applications but for the new flagship thing we're looking at ASP.NET 5 on Linux on Azure (BizSpark), Go where it makes sense performance-wise or problem-wise and possibly Postgres instead of SQL Server, although I'm not sure on that last bit yet.
- buffoon 11y agoThe last bit we're doing it because we got financially fucked by the core licensing changes in SQL 2012.