4 ms·

SQL Server/Windows Licenses costs shouldn't really be a problem if you've factor them into your business plan and expenses. The businesses that get into trouble

SQL Server/Windows Licenses costs shouldn't really be a problem if you've factor them into your business plan and expenses. The businesses that get into trouble are the ones that naively assume software is free.

a2tech 8y ago
They can be problematic if your growth doesn’t exactly match what your licensing growth plan is.
- hackits 8y ago
  You shouldn't be in business if you don't know what your growth will be. That is all part of your business operation's and deployment strategy.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    You might know exactly what your growth will be and realize that you cannot afford to license certain software after a certain point.
ebikelaw 8y ago
How do you figure in the chance that some birdbrain from Microsoft is going to call you up and demand that you participate in a "voluntary" audit of your license compliance, which you agreed to as a term of your Windows license agreement? I know many of you don't really remember the 90s, but Microsoft was and is evil. I wouldn't touch anything from them, or Oracle, with a ten-foot pole.
- lovich 8y ago
  If you're going to go down that line of reasoning you are going to find out that no company is trustworthy, especially those at the top. Microsoft is much easier to deal with now vs the 90s precisely because they are no longer the top dog and know they have to compete with the FAANG companies for many of their offerings
  - beagle3 8y ago
    Last I looked, MS volume licensing terms were just as bad as in the early 2000's ; If you want the 50% discount, you have to agree to an external audit of any MS software. The licensing is even more complex than it was. I have no statistics about them being "easier to deal with", so I'll take your word for it; But they still hold the same power once you sign, and can use it at their discretion. No company is trustworthy, but some are much less than others - a few at the "trustworthy to be evil" level.
InclinedPlane 8y ago
The problem and the cost is not just the licensing. It's also the logistical overhead and the complexity tax. Imagine a parallel world, one where you could spin up Windows and SQL Server installations with ease and you just get a bill at the end of the year for your licensing costs, with easy payment and financing terms. If that were the way things work (and it is to some extent for the cloud, one reason why azure is so popular) then it wouldn't be terribly bad to deal with MS technology. But in large part that's not how things work. Instead you have to deal with the overhead of finding out exactly what you need (do I want Windows Server 2016? what's the advantage of getting the Data Center SKU? do I want SQL Server clustering? etc.) then you have to go out and buy it, install it. And then, after all of that, you have to occasionally put up with Microsoft barging into your business and doing an intrusive audit to make sure you're not stealing anything. Compare that to the alternatives out there. If you have a big beefy server you can spin up a VM host and infinity linux VMs, you can run as many copies of nginx, postres, and all the other great technologies out there that you want. And you don't have to be burdened about the complexity of licensing, let alone the cost. When you are paying developers 500, 1000, 1500 bucks a day that complexity cost, and the opportunity cost from not just feeling free to experiment and try things out can easily be more expensive than the actual licensing. I love C#, coding in VS with the .NET stack behind you almost feels like cheating or like "easy mode" because there's just so much available to you and so much you can do trivially in that world which takes so much work and pain with other tech stacks. But ultimately the truth is that nginx is pretty much just a better web server than IIS and linux is a better platform than Windows, especially for services. Docker on windows is light years improved today compared to where it was a year ago, but it's still an also ran compared to Docker on linux. The Microsoft platform just doesn't have the edge it used to, which makes it hard to justify the cost.
- CyanLite2 8y ago
  The "new" Microsoft and .NET Core has solved much of the licensing issues and burden. Direct support for MySQL/Postgres and containerizing your app is only like 3 lines in your Dockerfile.
  - InclinedPlane 8y ago
wenc 8y ago
SQL Server and Windows licensing are actually major inhibitors, even at large enterprises. We have to manage our VL/CALs conservatively to control costs. Wanna spin up n VMs for production / distributed computing? For Windows, you have to license each VM, whereas with Linux, the incremental cost of another node is nearly 0. (Side note: I had high hopes for container support on Windows Server 2016 because unlike OS's, containers don't require individual licensing. Unfortunately Windows Containers are still immature, and are ironically second-class citizens in the Microsoft ecosystem compared to Linux containers) Wanna spin up a n database servers? A single SQL Server (Enterprise) instance is pretty pricey (and it's licensed per core, minimum 4), whereas Postgres is free for any number of users and any number of processor cores. You want several replicas of your SQL Server? It is $$$. With MySQL, every replica is free license-wise (there are other costs of course). The cloud has changed these calculations somewhat, but if your infrastructure is on-prem, Microsoft licensing can be prohibitive at scale.
- __sr__ 8y ago
  Do not forget — Microsoft licence costs also increase with the number of CPU cores in your server. In addition to costs themselves, Microsoft licensing is a highly complex topic. One of my colleagues who deals with Microsoft jokes that someone well versed with MS licensing deserves a PhD. A lot of people simply don’t want to deal with all that when they have a thousand other things to worry about.
  - angry_octet 8y ago
    And because of the cost the accountants demand tight centralised control, which ends up being slow and unresponsive, and you find yourself spinning (emailing, writing business cases, managing and reporting expenditure) instead of doing. It is a huge negative.
    - __sr__ 8y ago
      The horror! Fill gazillions of forms in triplicate and get them approved before we’d let you do anything useful.

a2tech 8y ago

They can be problematic if your growth doesn’t exactly match what your licensing growth plan is.

hackits 8y ago
You shouldn't be in business if you don't know what your growth will be. That is all part of your business operation's and deployment strategy.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  You might know exactly what your growth will be and realize that you cannot afford to license certain software after a certain point.

ebikelaw 8y ago

How do you figure in the chance that some birdbrain from Microsoft is going to call you up and demand that you participate in a "voluntary" audit of your license compliance, which you agreed to as a term of your Windows license agreement? I know many of you don't really remember the 90s, but Microsoft was and is evil. I wouldn't touch anything from them, or Oracle, with a ten-foot pole.

lovich 8y ago
If you're going to go down that line of reasoning you are going to find out that no company is trustworthy, especially those at the top. Microsoft is much easier to deal with now vs the 90s precisely because they are no longer the top dog and know they have to compete with the FAANG companies for many of their offerings
- beagle3 8y ago
  Last I looked, MS volume licensing terms were just as bad as in the early 2000's ; If you want the 50% discount, you have to agree to an external audit of any MS software. The licensing is even more complex than it was. I have no statistics about them being "easier to deal with", so I'll take your word for it; But they still hold the same power once you sign, and can use it at their discretion. No company is trustworthy, but some are much less than others - a few at the "trustworthy to be evil" level.

InclinedPlane 8y ago

The problem and the cost is not just the licensing. It's also the logistical overhead and the complexity tax. Imagine a parallel world, one where you could spin up Windows and SQL Server installations with ease and you just get a bill at the end of the year for your licensing costs, with easy payment and financing terms. If that were the way things work (and it is to some extent for the cloud, one reason why azure is so popular) then it wouldn't be terribly bad to deal with MS technology. But in large part that's not how things work. Instead you have to deal with the overhead of finding out exactly what you need (do I want Windows Server 2016? what's the advantage of getting the Data Center SKU? do I want SQL Server clustering? etc.) then you have to go out and buy it, install it. And then, after all of that, you have to occasionally put up with Microsoft barging into your business and doing an intrusive audit to make sure you're not stealing anything. Compare that to the alternatives out there. If you have a big beefy server you can spin up a VM host and infinity linux VMs, you can run as many copies of nginx, postres, and all the other great technologies out there that you want. And you don't have to be burdened about the complexity of licensing, let alone the cost. When you are paying developers 500, 1000, 1500 bucks a day that complexity cost, and the opportunity cost from not just feeling free to experiment and try things out can easily be more expensive than the actual licensing. I love C#, coding in VS with the .NET stack behind you almost feels like cheating or like "easy mode" because there's just so much available to you and so much you can do trivially in that world which takes so much work and pain with other tech stacks. But ultimately the truth is that nginx is pretty much just a better web server than IIS and linux is a better platform than Windows, especially for services. Docker on windows is light years improved today compared to where it was a year ago, but it's still an also ran compared to Docker on linux. The Microsoft platform just doesn't have the edge it used to, which makes it hard to justify the cost.

CyanLite2 8y ago
The "new" Microsoft and .NET Core has solved much of the licensing issues and burden. Direct support for MySQL/Postgres and containerizing your app is only like 3 lines in your Dockerfile.
- InclinedPlane 8y ago

wenc 8y ago

SQL Server and Windows licensing are actually major inhibitors, even at large enterprises. We have to manage our VL/CALs conservatively to control costs. Wanna spin up n VMs for production / distributed computing? For Windows, you have to license each VM, whereas with Linux, the incremental cost of another node is nearly 0. (Side note: I had high hopes for container support on Windows Server 2016 because unlike OS's, containers don't require individual licensing. Unfortunately Windows Containers are still immature, and are ironically second-class citizens in the Microsoft ecosystem compared to Linux containers) Wanna spin up a n database servers? A single SQL Server (Enterprise) instance is pretty pricey (and it's licensed per core, minimum 4), whereas Postgres is free for any number of users and any number of processor cores. You want several replicas of your SQL Server? It is $$$. With MySQL, every replica is free license-wise (there are other costs of course). The cloud has changed these calculations somewhat, but if your infrastructure is on-prem, Microsoft licensing can be prohibitive at scale.

__sr__ 8y ago
Do not forget — Microsoft licence costs also increase with the number of CPU cores in your server. In addition to costs themselves, Microsoft licensing is a highly complex topic. One of my colleagues who deals with Microsoft jokes that someone well versed with MS licensing deserves a PhD. A lot of people simply don’t want to deal with all that when they have a thousand other things to worry about.
- angry_octet 8y ago
  And because of the cost the accountants demand tight centralised control, which ends up being slow and unresponsive, and you find yourself spinning (emailing, writing business cases, managing and reporting expenditure) instead of doing. It is a huge negative.
  - __sr__ 8y ago
    The horror! Fill gazillions of forms in triplicate and get them approved before we’d let you do anything useful.