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Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores
- babarock 6y agoBetween 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!
- enitihas 6y agoI doubt they would be larger than AWS, specially for Linux.
- close04 6y agoBetween Azure and WSL Microsoft might be shipping more Linux kernels than any other company out there.
- flatiron 6y agomore 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.)
- greggyb 6y agoDo you think WSL counts if not enabled?
- Wohlf 6y agoOptional 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.
- greggyb 6y agoI actually was thinking further on this. WSL is not a Linux kernel. In WSL1, it's a syscall translation layer. In WSL2, it's a highly integrated virtualization environment. You do have to install a Linux distro. So the kernel's not shipping, just an environment in which a kernel can be installed.
- axaxs 6y agoGCP and the little project called 'Android' would probably make Google the leader, by far.
- wiml 6y agoI think you might underestimate how many Linux kernels+userlands show up embedded in non-"computer" devices!
- partiallypro 6y agoThere are so many crappy IoT devices running unpatched Linux, that I doubt it. That is why Azure Sphere was invented, actually...but still there are so many gadgets out there running unmaintained Linux that it's insane.
- close04 6y agoMost likely but I was thinking of shipments made by a single company.
- Random_ernest 6y agoAWS 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-cloud-market-share/ https://www.parkmycloud.com/blog/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-clou...
- enitihas 6y agoYup, plus Azure had some 40-50% VMs running Windows IIRC, so unlikely to be running more linux than AWS.
- ch_123 6y agoThey were possibly the largest Unix vendor in the 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix
- angry_octet 6y agoDefine "largest" in the right way and that might be true, as the market was very fragmented, but certainly not in terms of market share.
- rbanffy 6y ago50%?! That's surprisingly low.
- outside1234 6y agoIt is more that the percentage of workloads that are running Windows that are hosted on Azure (vs. GCP or Amazon) is very high.
- angry_octet 6y agoI 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.
- duskwuff 6y agoWhich is, in turn, because Azure provides an unusually good deal for Windows users -- free Windows licenses for VM guests, Active Directory integration...
- lucb1e 6y agoBy CPU cores. I mean, Windows versus Linux server CPU requirements... I don't know if FAANG-like companies are together large enough to skew the median or if the median web server is a single core Nginx system or something in between, but Windows on a single CPU just sounds horrible. It would be interesting to see the contrast when counting by base OS (so LXC etc. within a system doesn't count).
- tombert 6y agoThis 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.
- code_duck 6y agoIt just makes sense to run a server OS that works well and is full-featured when there is no GUI.
- tombert 6y agoYou 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?
- code_duck 6y agoI don't mean as far as idle resource usage. The advantage of Linux is when you want to accomplish tasks without a great internet connection, but the windows tools are not evolved enough as far as command line functionality.
- jen20 6y agoThis was once the case, but PowerShell has been a solid administration tool for quite some time now. OpenSSH Server also ships as part of Windows, which was the missing link (since WinRM is, charitably, awful). The remote administration experience of Windows is now certainly comparable to Linux, in my opinion.
- ogre_codes 6y agoIs 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 6y agoI 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 6y agoYou know you’re suggesting it’s crazy that Microsoft would suggest their own OS as the default, right?
- whoisjuan 6y agoWouldn’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.
- _jal 6y agoMaybe ask it a different way. Is it crazy for a bar that brews its own beer to prefer to serve it?
- luckylion 6y agoIf the majority of customers prefers another beer they also sell? Yes, kind of. If the customers most likely wants the other beer, you're wasting his time by asking him whether he wants to try your special brew. I don't believe Microsoft is attached to making Windows the default though. Who knows why it is, maybe because people that use the Wizard are likely playing around and will rather want a Windows system? My guess is they'll switch the default if the percentages shift even more and they see that most that manually set something up will change the default. In the end, they want to sell computing and anything that gets in the way, well, gets in the way.
- jamieweb 6y agoI'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...!
- GordonS 6y agoMicrosoft 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).
- jamieweb 6y agoI was surprised to see that the web server for www.microsoft.com reports via the 'Server:' header that it runs on IIS 10. To me that just seems weird... even though it's their product.
- jrockway 6y agoIt's out there. One website that always impresses me with its extreme speed is McMaster-Carr. Their Server header also claims they're using IIS.
- pmiller2 6y agoOther than bespoke enterprise apps, my guess would be the majority of the remaining Windows machines run SQL server.
- sitkack 6y agoDoesn't SQL server run under Wine or https://reactos.org/wiki/ReactOS https://reactos.org/wiki/ReactOS ?
- hi41 6y agoI bought books such as Linux Programming Interface to learn linux so that I can apply for jobs. Later I discovered that when the companies say Linux, they don't mean writing native applications on Linux, but that they are actually talking about java applications on app servers such as JBoss. Does anyone write native applications like thick client native applications on Windows which is also rare these days.
- dijit 6y agoI'm in a bit of an odd place here, but we develop C++ on Windows (both client and server software). You'd think that C++ would be relatively portable (though not as portable as Java), but you'd be mistaken. So many things are not portable.
- whb07 6y agoI actually was writing C and lo and behold MSFT has a 16 byte char as their default. lol tchar
- int_19h 6y agoTCHAR is a Win9x relic hasn't really been something to be concerned with for well over a decade now. It took a while for MSDN to acknowledge that, but these days it even documents the A/W versions of each struct and function explicitly, and doesn't mention the generic aliases. But wchar_t is still 16-bit, yes - it's baked into the ABI for good now. It's not even a "default", since you can't change it.
- whytaka 6y agoI am very interested in the book you mention, simply out of passion. How do you find it?
- starik36 6y agoAssuming this... https://www.amazon.com/Linux-Programming-Interface-System-Handbook/dp/1593272200 https://www.amazon.com/Linux-Programming-Interface-System-Ha...
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoI'm not sure I understand why this is the case, is there some advantage Azure has for hosting Linux that the many other providers don't have?
- jandrese 6y agoI suspect Linux is the majority across all hosting services. No OS license nonsense to worry about and easy to remotely administer with a simple ssh connection.
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoI can see the benefits of Linux, I'm just wondering why host it on Azure.
- koffiezet 6y agoDepends on your situation. If you're already in bed with Microsoft, the support you get is pretty damn nice, and surprised me a lot. A client of mine, a large multinational's overall corporate IT is very much Microsoft oriented, but I was working together with an R&D division, setting up a Linux/k8s-based proof of concept project. Somehow, the Azure team got wind of this and asked if we could meet. I expected absolutely nothing, but they ended up sending very competent technical sales guy, together with 2 engineers, that could answer every single question I threw at them, and they offered to help designing and setting up the infrastructure part, without us ever asking, no strings or invoices attached. I think this sped up the poc by about a month or 2, just because they backed my opinion pretty much all the time, and had very valuable feedback and proposals to tackle certain other things. It also removed a lot of political crap, which is always there in a multinational. Being able to show the department head that Microsoft agreed with my solutions carried quite a bit of weight, and it didn't hurt my position at all. Now, one of the managers tried to get the same support from both AWS and Google. AWS could send us some engineers (which would just be some freelance AWS certified engineers), but they fully determined the schedule (first slot we could get was 3 months after us asking), and there was a quite hefty invoice attached. Google didn't even respond. Now I know that cloud providers don't work that way, but many businesses don't like that. They want to be able to call someone when shit hits the fan. MS just uses their "boots on the ground" to also push azure within such businesses, and I'm not surprised it's working. But would I host stuff there myself? Doubt it. I think the top 3 cloud providers are just too expensive.
- punnerud 6y agoI think Microsoft figured one thing out; you can’t fire a man who get things done especially if there is little documentation. And you can’t avoid writing things down if you can’t remember it. And you can’t remember it if it isn’t visual. I am way more productive on Linux, but I can see that this also put you in a position to easily be replaced.
- aea12 6y agoYeah, those plebeian tool swingers often woefully misinterpret the shrewd protocols of someone who non-ironically shares that “unfortunately another human had a personal conversation with me after I started a business conversation”. It’s a real problem. Sorry that happened to you. Better to avoid people entirely and stick to Excel, in my experience, but the good news is you got a completely appropriate and tasteful and in no way horrible story about another human’s final experiences out of it, so it worked out.
- qubex 6y agoWhat On Earth are you talking about??
- aea12 6y agoHow horrifically inappropriate your entire story was, and how worse off we all are having read it. You had that one in the bag waiting for “crematorium” to be contextual, I’m sure, but I’m only left saddened about human experience arriving at the end of your story without a shred of hesitation at making light of someone’s indignity in such spectacular fashion. And, on top of it, you plopped “unfortunately” behind someone... talking to you, then co-opted their horrible story to share with all of us here. I feel like I need a shower and I didn’t expect to read “that one time a worker annoyed me with a story about a fat person being removed from an oven half-cremated” on an article about Linux in Azure. Jesus Christ.
- vageli 6y agoI think your interpretation is more telling of your own worldview than the parent. It had never occurred to me that such a failure mode could happen, and I thought it was a good story to share. It seems like something that may have been caught had a crematorium management system been in place.
- aea12 6y agoMy own worldview that people are universally people and we all deserve dignity in death? Yeah, I know, what a tragic way of looking at things. I drink myself to death over it. Even accepting your criticism, the same exact thing is communicable without (a) the unnecessary detail about the decedent’s weight and (b) specific recollections of the event in question. Tradespeople communicate like that among each other because of how grim the work is. I know because I was one before I got thrown in with this lot, who apparently think I’m weird for not being on board with an aborted cremation being communicated in detail because it’s ostensibly a JIRA user story in waiting, if I’ve understood your almost equally distasteful worldview correctly. I’m looking forward to your startup addressing this issue, since you seem to be so keen on the purity of the engineering discussion beyond irrelevant brain filling on an article about operating systems in the bloody datacenter.
- intellectronica 6y agodog bites man
- Mr_Sweater 6y agoThis might be short sighted of me, I dont have a ton of cloud experience but I imagine its as obvious as Linux scales orders of magnitude better than Windows, the projects that need massive scale go cloud. Conversely sql server can demand massive scaling, I wonder what percent of Win Server are for sql server workloads.
- VWWHFSfQ 6y agoI feel like it's inevitable that Microsoft will acquire Canonical at some point.
- kilroy123 6y agoI'm not so sure they'd ever even say yes to that.
- VWWHFSfQ 6y agowhen shuttleworth decides to stop funding it out of his pocket
- segmondy 6y agoNah, they will build windows subsystem on top of Linux.
- int_19h 6y agoWhy not RedHat? That's where the enterprise Linux server market seemingly is.
- Traster 6y agoI find it really funny that it used to be peole would point to Linux usage in Microsoft as a "Hah! Look how crap Windows is!". In reality, this is just reflective of the fact that Microsoft is succeeding even without Windows, which in my opinion is quite an extraordinarily impressive manouvre. People think seem to cheer on the death of windows as if Microsoft were the same company as it was when people were booing Steve Jobs at the Macworld announcement.
- ndesaulniers 6y agoThis is great; a significant portion of potential growth to Microsoft's revenue tied to Linux is good for Linux and continued investment in Linux from Microsoft.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- I_am_tiberius 6y agoI had to move from Digital Ocean to Azure recently because my customers didn't know DO and thought they can't trust them. I was super happy with DO though. Azure is the ridiculously expensive without bringing any benefit. Sure, there are client tools but I don't need them. It seems to me every click I do on the Azure portal makes the costs increase by a few euros. I wish Digital Ocean would be accepted by more corporate clients.
- Havoc 6y ago>Azure is the ridiculously expensive without bringing any benefit. I suspect that comes down to whether you need a VM or a VM in a massive ecosystem of other stuff you can connect to it
- mekster 6y agoNot just expensive but the Azure web interface is a huge maze that I cannot even simply find out last month's cost breakdown in minutes. That was so much like Windows messed up UI, it wasn't funny.
- I_am_tiberius 6y agoYes, fun is something else.
- vmchale 6y agoMakes sense. I can hardly think of anyone who doesn't use a Unix for servers.
- aidenn0 6y agoBut approximately 100% the people that use Windows in the cloud are going to be using Azure.
- terrywang 6y agoWorked on XenServer for Citrix (XenSource) for a couple of years (fun ride), I was told / also discovered that most XenServer pools were used to run Windows infra to support XenDesktop / ICA based remote access;-) Now Linux has won over 50% of server market share in MicroSoft Azure, where I believe Hyper-V running on Windows is the hypervisor (Hyper-V is closely related to Xen). - Linux has won (in the cloud). - No one has ever thought one can use Linux desktop on windows via WSL one day. - The best tool (distro, etc.)is the one that does what you need at the best cost ;-) As a long term Linux desktop user (since Fedora Core 1 Yarrow), MicroSoft used to be the public enemy of open source, used to disgust me, now (after vs code, WSL, GitHub, showed genuine love to Linux and the community, etc.) I turn neutral (AFAIR - unless that was a daydream, Linus said similar thing).
- amaccuish 6y agoI really wish Citrix would still do a home-oriented XenApp/XenDesktop. I still find ICA weirdly better than RDP, it's so much smoother.
- terrywang 6y agoI think VDI is still Citrix's core competency. They merged XenApp with XenDesktop and later on turned into something called Citrix Workspace, I haven't been following Citrix products other than XenServer (my only interest joining back then). It's not cheap to run and maintain XenDesktop based VDI infra for remote access. But I agree, ICA (improved RDP) and its client Receiver (works on Linux at least used to ;-) offers unique and seamless user experience working remotely.
- gardnr 6y agoAt a startup back in 2017, we received a substantial amount of free Azure credit through the their innovation program. At the time, there was no way to run postgres with guaranteed iops. You had to run SQL server to get guaranteed iops. We ended up deploying to AWS instead.
- tracker1 6y agoI'm not surprised by this... I'm not sure what the actual raw numbers are, but would be surprised if it weren't. A lot of what I've worked on the past 5+ years targeted Linux and/or Linux Docker containers. Currently restructuring and migrating apps to .Net Core so that they can be containerized.