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Microsoft says 40 percent of all VMs in Azure now are running Linux
- ed_blackburn 9y agoSeems very low for public cloud provider.
- brianwawok 9y agoWho chooses to use Azure? Mostly MS shops. I see no compelling features for a FOSS shop.
- Ysx 9y agoVersus open source AWS? Google Cloud?
- rbanffy 9y agoWhy would you want to go with Azure over AWS or Google? Or Digital Ocean? Like GP said, I can see very few compelling features to adopt Microsoft's platform. Is there a killer feature I'm unaware of? edit: clarify. And "burn, karma, burn"
- abiox 9y agowell, i think "for a FOSS shop" is important context in that comment (simply asking "why use azure" is different). aws and gcp run plenty of bits that aren't "FOSS" in any respect, just like azure.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rbanffy 9y agoDoes Azure have a killing feature that appeals to a non-Windows shop?
- hungerstrike 9y agoWhat makes one a "FOSS" shop? I use tons of FOSS in my products but I prefer SQL Server and ASP.NET for my backend. I also do most of my code editing from Windows and sometimes I use my Mac. I rarely use Linux to edit code or do anything desktop-related, but I still use it to run Redis instances. I'm still a FOSS shop. The people developing all their FOSS on Macbooks using a proprietary OS are still FOSS shops too. The world isn't black and white. Anyway, the thing I like about Azure over AWS is that it's more organized and simpler to deal with. Azure is focused on high-quality while AWS pretty much throws spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. That's why AWS has 3 of every type of service.
- rrhd 9y agoWhy wouldn't you, other than hatred of MS.
- Kuraj 9y agoAs a .NET developer, I am provided with a MSDN sub by my employer and it comes with a monthly Azure allowance I can spend on whatever. So somewhere down the road, even if I quit and decide to work with FOSS, for me the reason might be familiarity - which is not unlike the reason a lot of people insist on using other Microsoft products.
- kbutler 9y agoSo you are a professional, self-deceived (edit:that was an autocorrect from self-described!! I'd have downvoted me, too.) developer-on-microsoft the definition of an "MS shop", even if you later choose to diversify your platform.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mattmanser 9y agoI thought we were over the MS hate last decade? While I personally feel the performance of Azure is bad vs cost, and the management portal is a mess UI and performance wise, it's a decent product. Nothing like deploying your app from scratch from Git in a couple of clicks. I also filed a support call the other day and got truly exemplary phone support within a few hours from someone who definitely knew their stuff.
- Aloha 9y agoSome places don't have a choice but to be a Microsoft shop - if your customers use Microsoft, your product had better run in their ecosystem.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- johnnycarcin 9y agoAs someone who works at MSFT in the Azure space I can tell you that the statement of "Who chooses to use Azure? Mostly MS shops" is inaccurate in my experience. Of all of the customers I've worked with, most of their architecture is at least 50% linux/OSS, typically more like 75%. I've honestly yet to see a customer moving to Azure who has more than 50% Windows based systems. Almost everyone I've worked with only uses Windows Server for their SQL Server services, outside of that it's RHEL, CentOS or Ubuntu. With that being said, the typical appeal of Azure (and likely other cloud providers) are the PaaS services. Those typically do have Windows VMs sitting behind them, although we are starting to make Linux an option on most of those.
- rsynnott 9y agoIt seems likely that most people who use SQL Server were at least Microsoft shops at some time in the past, though; otherwise why are they using SQL Server? Very few people start a project using SQL Server if they're not otherwise using MS stuff.
- johnnycarcin 9y agoUsually, again this is just in my experience, it's typically tied to a single service that makes up a larger system. So they might have some data in MySQL that has an API fronting it that is managed by one team. Then they have another service that uses SQL Server fronted by another API and managed by a different team. Both of those APIs are used by something larger. Sometimes it's because a long time ago the service was done by a whole different set of people and now some other group has inherited it and just doesn't want to port it to something else even though everything else they use is open source. These are typically the groups who go to the Azure SQL PaaS service because they don't want to manage something that they don't really care for. There is a ton of fragmentation out there :)
- gaius 9y agoWe'll see this change as SQL Server on Linux matures.
- 9y ago
- nailer 9y agoAzure's UX is less of a tyre-fire of complexity than AWS, on the other hand it breaks more.
- SEJeff 9y agoThey allow you to have native RDMA[1] for your VMs, something neither amazon or google will give you. As an oldhat Linux/Unix guy, it is somewhat amusing to think of Microsoft's cloud offering as the high perf one, but the facts don't lie. If you have true HPC style workloads such as bioinformatics, oil/natgas exploration, finance, etc, the extra node to node communication bits are necessary. The QDR fabric they have has a native speed of 40 Gbps. It is a shame they don't have FDR (56G) or EDR (100G), but still is quite impressive depending on your app. This also could be a game changer for large MPI jobs. In short, there are reasons, they likely aren't ones that matter to you, but they exist (as I type this from my RHEL7 work desktop!) [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/sizes-hpc#rdma-capable-instances https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/wind...
- latencyloser 9y agoAlso, many companies that are competitors to Amazon in some form or another. Those tend to be the larger customers in my experience. Source: Am MSFT dev on the Azure side of things.
- Nux 9y agoNot really, considering the main user base of Azure are the Windows/M$ people. Goes to show Linux has truly become the swiss army knife of computing.
- megaman22 9y agoJoke I heard this week was that 2017 is finally the year of the Linux desktop... except its the Linux subsystem embedded in Windows 10 desktops.
- cjsuk 9y agoThe irony of this being is that it sucks bad enough still that I'm using Virtualbox + vagrant on my windows desktop. Windows is a window manager for Chrome, vagrant/vbox, putty. I even use OWA for outlook on windows.
- blinkingled 9y agoWhy not Hyper-V instead of VBOX? Much better in every aspect other than maybe desktop. I wish Linux gained enhanced session support.
- abiox 9y agoin my experience hyper-v doesn't handle graphical stuff very well, so a desktop linux experience much worse than vmware workstation or virtualbox.
- nlawalker 9y agoYeah I miss this as well. I have a Hyper-V Linux VM into which I have mounted a share from the Windows host, and it works great for everything I can do from SSH, but the graphical desktop performance is awful.
- cjsuk 9y agoI've run Hyper-V in production with SCVMM. No thanks. More seriously, it's not portable and not something I want to invest in any further brain-wise. Plus you can't drive half of it with vagrant. I burned about 4 days recently learning that.
- kyberias 9y ago?? Azure is used mainly by Microsoft customers who prefer Windows VMs, so the low number of Linux VMs is not surprising. It's actually surprisingly high.
- MichaelGG 9y agoEspecially because as of a year ago, Hyper V still had terrible, terrible, time support. Kernel logs are filled with spam about the clock being jumped. Time sync constantly drifts seconds all over. Compared to our Linux VMs on GCP, which get millisecond sync and stay that way because NTP actually works on whatever platform they use. It's shocking that Windows still has no proper NTP support and people are OK with their clocks being so off. Makes logging and debugging certain issues a bigger pain.
- kyberias 9y agoI'm not so sure Azure is running Hyper-V, like the same that comes as part of Windows. So any Windows Hyper-V limitations might not apply to Azure and vice versa.
- rsynnott 9y agoSelection bias; most people who want Windows will use Azure (it at least used to be quite a bit cheaper than the rest for Windows, and it doesn't treat it as a second-class citizen). On the other hand, there's arguably little reason to use Azure if you just want Linux; it's less mature than AWS and not generally cheaper. I suspect most Linux users have some sort of hybrid system and are using _both_.
- skynode 9y agoLots of emotional comments with the usual I-hate-MS bent, without a single reference to data showing Azure [Linux VM] users or non-users. Always shocking to see individuals who claim to be rational and open-minded in one domain become irrational, closed and judgemental in another.
- gaius 9y agoAzure is great. It's the secret weapon of those who took the time to evaluate the clouds instead of just following the crowds.
- tytytytytytytyt 9y agoWhy is it better than AWS or others?
- gaius 9y agoMore and better layered services (e.g. MLStudio), more regions/locations, option of going hybrid (Azure Stack), better container support with per-second billing, the list goes on and on.
- hackerfromthefu 9y agoIs their hybrid cloud a real thing now? I remember them touting it around 5 years ago, but for years it just never arrived, till I gave up waiting. Just seemed like a bait and switch actually.
- jdc0589 9y agoI wouldn't go so far as to say it's a secret weapon, but they have added a HUGE amount of services in a very short amount of time relative to the other player. I still don't like though.
- tytytytytytytyt 9y ago> Lots of emotional comments with the usual I-hate-MS bent How do you even get that from these comments? Is 3 comments 'lots' now?
- YCode 9y agoI'd be interested to see how this breaks down as a function of cost instead of raw numbers. This would for example control for development environments and pet projects as compared to production projects running on the platform.
- j_s 9y agoYes, and account for Microsoft giving serious usage giant credits too.
- jdc0589 9y agoehhh...maybe our definitions of serious usage are different, but even then their EA based discount model is dumb. At our peak on azure we we're doing about $120k/month, but didn't bother committing to more than $200k/yr because the discounts just weren't awesome. last time I looked the discounts on more modern VM types were WAY worse than what we used to get on older generations. Also, once you are on EA billing all the decent billing/usage tools in the azure portal stop working (they aren't that great anyway) and you basically have to buy or roll your own.
- teilo 9y agoThis doesn't surprise me overmuch. The foot in the door is Office 365 Enterprise, which comes with AD in Azure for free. From there, it's natural to setup a VPN to your Azure environment. With that in place, competitive pricing, and better compliance tools (such as host-external session-based flow monitoring) it becomes an attractive solution. Tie that to experience with Hyper-V. Companies like mine who have unused Hyper-V capacity due to Microsoft's ridiculous VM licensing scheme for Windows, tend to run Linux instances on that extra capacity. The high performance of Linux on Hyper-V was an eye-opener for us. I could see us using Azure for Linux. That said, we are 99% AWS, and I don't see our online platform ever moving from them.
- UnoriginalGuy 9y ago> Microsoft's ridiculous VM licensing scheme for Windows Microsoft offers at least three different ways to license Windows to run on a VM in-house. Core count, instance count, or site. Are all three "ridiculous?" None of Microsoft's license types require a certain Hyper-V capacity. In fact the whole "we were required to over-allocate Hyper-V so run Linux on the spare capacity" claim makes no sense.
- a2tech 9y agoYes, they're all ridiculous. Also their licensing model is so hideously complex even different license advisors from Microsoft will give you different answers as to what you need. The only way you feel comfortable being fully in compliance with licensing is by massively overbuying. Its a ridiculous burden to place on a business.
- teilo 9y agoThere is no such thing as instance or site pricing for Windows Server. Where are you getting that from? There is only core licensing, and you have to license all cores in a hypervisor, 16 minimum, and then you can only run two Windows Server instances unless you re-licensing all cores on the host a second time. The exception to that rule is Datacenter edition, which is only cost effective for large businesses running high-density servers. (7.5x the price for the same number of cores vs. Standard.) http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/2/9/7290EA05-DC56-4BED-9400-138C5701F174/WS2016LicensingDatasheet.pdf http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/2/9/7290EA05-DC56-4...
- sheeshkebab 9y agoIt’s great to have alternatives to AWS.
- lurchedsawyer 9y agoIt WOULD BE great to have alternatives to AWS. Here, fixed that for you.
- abiox 9y agowhat do gcp and azure need to be considered alternatives?
- lurchedsawyer 9y agoNothing against GCP. It's considering Azure as an alternative that I object to. Here's a couple of ideas: 1. Linux support. If you look in Azure documentation they never say they support any Linux distro - they "endorse" a couple. Amazon provides their own for of Centos with all the conveniences like having the AWS CLI pre-installed. Incidentally Azure is the only cloud platform where I've had machines kernel panic randomly. 2. A consistent interface. The Azure portal has been under development for over 2 years now but you still need to use the "classic" interface for some settings. 3. Database support. Other then MS SQL Server. MySQL is supposed to be in beta. It's been in AWS since 2009. Also Amazon is developing AuroraDB which is, supposedly, optimised to work in AWS. 4. Availability zones. Again in preview in Azure but have been in AWS since 2008. What's also interesting is, up until now MS marketed "Availabilty sets" as the Azure version of AZ. One is a guarantee that a box will be spun up on a different rack within the same datacenter, the other guarantees the box in a separate DC. 5. A consistent API. And I don't mean the definitions being immutable - that's actually handled with schema versioning. I mean getting the correct responses. Although unchanging API would be nice as well. Here's an example: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bz59vPCFY-fham1qN1E1MnZBclk https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bz59vPCFY-fham1qN1E1MnZBcl... (3mb video). What basically happened was, I would deploy my environment, run Ansible against it and get errors/unconfigured nodes. So what happens in the video is: I run 'for i in 1 2 3; do azure vm list; done' and get three different responses: a list of VMs, an error message saying I have insufficient access rights to list the VMs and an empty list. All are incorrect. The first one is the closest to the truth but it's still missing one box. I get eventual consistency is a thing, but this was >30min after the boxes had been provisioned. So to answer your question as to what is needed for Azure to become a viable alternative to AWS: I would say about 10 years.
- srcmap 9y agoThis is the "Return of the Jedi" Episode where the Young Jedi finally able to bring Darth Vader back to the Light Side of the Force. George Lucas predicted this in 1983.
- azureisslow 9y agoI currently have a client moving from an on prem environment to Azure, which was chosen because they are 100% a Microsoft shop. After using AWS since about the time it launched, and then GCP for the past couple years, Azure is a constant headache. As I type this I’m waiting for resources in the region to stop throwing allocation errors. I also have another terraform config running that’s been trying to delete only 6 VMs for the past 20 minutes. Spinning up a single VM takes way too long as well. I had random conversations with shops that are doing very large Azure deployments before I started this project and they all basically said “yeah Azure sucks, but with all the credits Microsoft gave us it’s basically free.” I would never recommend a client use Azure when the two alternatives are so much better. The only reason seems to be free credits or they’re blindly committed to a Microsoft ecosystem.
- draw_down 9y agoThey can make money off of Linux, so it’s good now.
- known 9y agoTime for MS to rollout MS-Linux
- luckydude 9y agoI have long yearned for a libmicrosoft.a that runs on top of Linux and provides the MS ABI. Best of both worlds.
- mmgutz 9y agoWe're running our Debian farm on Azure thanks to startup perks. It's been up 100% for us the last 2.5 years. Azure service is no less or better than AWS.
- jefe_ 9y agoRemove Windows servers not being used as web servers (active directory, sharepoint, domain controllers, exchange, etc.) and the Linux number is probably near or above 50%. This share will only grow with Microsoft embracing Linux in .NET Core, and many of the next wave of cloud consumers being small to mid-sized orgs looking to move to managed cloud applications vs. simply putting their machines in the cloud.