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The government department standardizes on Azure but all the young devs push for Linux servers so all their shiny toys work great. Windows is truly dead on the
by bhouston 7y ago
The government department standardizes on Azure but all the young devs push for Linux servers so all their shiny toys work great.
Windows is truly dead on the cloud and has been for a decade. The only thing people use it for is self hosted exchange, and file servers and active domains - legacy stuff.
- kerng 7y agoEveryone uses Active Directory because its basically the only functional solution for its problem space.
- ratiolat 7y agoWhich problem space is that? For group policy part cfengine, salt, puppet are far better (group policy is just modifying windows registry and manipulating files although at first it seemes a bit like magic). For authentication we have kerberos, which Microsoft pulled in from the free world beginning with Windows 2000. Kerberos does not fly in the Cloud world though.
- pjc50 7y agoHave you ever actually done that - managed a large fleet of desktops and a productivity suite, all on Linux with no active directory? Complete with whatever the Kerberos equivalent of a backup DC is?
- ratiolat 7y agoThe problem with AD is that it is for windows only. It does not fly for managing Mac and Linux desktops. So that gives us salt for example, which has clients for all three. The second problem with ad is that if you need to manage any complex settings, you'll need to write your own templates. The included group policies are only for basic level os management + some for basic level Microsoft office managment stuff. Anything else and it's scripting + manual work and AD is only for distribution and selecting hosts/users where to apply those settings. And yes, I've managed multi thousand workstation networks with AD. Do not recommend it.
- issati 7y agoAD isn't just for Windows, which would be weird since it is mostly a fancy key value store (with associated functions and services of course). SSSD for example can use AD. The problem is that Linux itself doesn't support the same functionality client side, which using a configuration manager doesn't really solve. And question wasn't if you have used AD, but if you have managed Linux desktop deployments without it. Since your claim is that it is better.
- ratiolat 7y agoI'm in the process of bulding a solution for managing all three OS'es. AD is not on the table because theres nothing to do with kerberos in our network and AD would be a "windows only" solution.
- gmueckl 7y agoLinux can totally run in a AD domain with auth managed by AD. Client side SMB is also not bad. But you are excluding Kerberos for some unrelated reason, right?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kerng 7y agoWhy is AD a Windows only solution? Large corporations and startups use it to run tens of thousands of Macs and Linux machines in addition to Windows. In fact, I can't think of a single large company that does not use it. Its basically the core for many.
- IOT_Apprentice 7y agoI would imagine that Google has and is doing that, as is AWS.
- kerng 7y agoYou'd be surprised how big of a Microsoft shop Amazon is. It's pretty representative of a large company actually.
- berbec 7y agoAnd Dropbox is just sshfs, ftp-mount etc. There is a huge advantage to having an all-in-one, it just works, solution. Active directory is such a solution and does really well. Login to a different mschine and things are just setup. Push programs, setting, updates. Change security. It's great.
- closeparen 7y agoThere is an entire parallel community of business IT, basically unknown and unintelligible to the Silicon Valley community, where the Microsoft server-side stack is as obvious a choice as Linux is in our world. You may even have some of it in your company. It's really amusing (and dysfunctional) when our projects require "Eng" and "Corp IT" to cooperate. We're both ostensibly computer professionals who select, write, and operate production services, yet to each side the other may as well be from Mars.
- flomo 7y agoLike 10 years ago, I thought it was great when we garnered a client which was one those "Microsoft only" type shops, because I like C#/NET. But the only justification for using it was really "IT made us do it". And I saw how the IT leadership in these places were older people perhaps maybe fighting older political battles. In any case its been many years since I've stumbled across a pure Microsoft shop. I think Azure means they know they lost, but also have legacy business to support.
- tjpnz 7y ago>But the only justification for using it was really "IT made us do it". And I saw how the IT leadership in these places were older people perhaps maybe fighting older political battles. I've seen this happen too in predominantly Linux shops. In the early 2000s Microsoft worked hard to cultivate relationships with future IT leaders and those relationships have a way of enduring. Even if your CIO can't get everyone onto Windows they might still find a place for Office 365 without much time spent weighing up the alternatives.
- kyllo 7y agoHosting SQL Server has been another common use case for Windows Server for a long time, though it can run on Linux too now.
- cbluth 7y agoThe last time I installed sql server was on Linux
- karmicthreat 7y agoLast I looked many of SQL server advanced features didn't work on Linux. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux-release-notes?view=sql-server-2017#Unsupported https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux-...
- kyllo 7y agoRight, like no Analysis & Reporting Services on Linux means if you're using it for BI, you're probably still running it on Windows.