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I'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 t

I'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 ago
Microsoft 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    It'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 ago
Other than bespoke enterprise apps, my guess would be the majority of the remaining Windows machines run SQL server.
- sitkack 6y ago
  Doesn't SQL server run under Wine or https://reactos.org/wiki/ReactOS https://reactos.org/wiki/ReactOS ?
  - josteink 6y ago
    Microsoft officially support SQL Server on Linux and Docker now: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-downloads https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-downlo... No need for emulation.
    - tracker1 6y ago
      The docker images have been great... can spin up a fresh install and deploy schema and config in a couple minutes for local development.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - topspin 6y ago
    Microsoft supports SQL server on Linux. No need for Wine.
  - flatiron 6y ago
    If you have wine in your production stack you gotta be doing something wrong. I did have some reporting tools run in Dosbox though as we couldn’t get the printer working without it. And it printed the reports and OCR’d them in because every time someone tried to rewrite that reporting tool they never got the same numbers and nobody wanted to be the one who answered the question as to “well whose right”
  - wwright 6y ago
    I would bet that the license doesn’t encourage that, and SQL Server is the sort of software where the license is king.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
cameronbrown 6y ago
Virtual desktops or straight up on-prem to cloud migration might be my guess. If big companies can avoid it, why pay the cost of a rewrite? > Crematorium Management System Genuine question: why can't you use Microsoft Access or G Suite for this? Seems like the canonical data entry use case these products are designed for.
- willtim 6y ago
  A Crematorium Management System built in Microsoft Access is still a Crematorium Management System.
flohofwoe 6y ago
I don't have actual numbers obviously, but I'd imagine that a lot of Xbox multiplayer game backends and probably all of Xbox Live is running on Azure Windows servers, and Xbox is a pretty big platform by number of users. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/11/microsoft-wants-azure-to-be-the-multiplayer-server-solution-for-every-platform/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/11/microsoft-wants-azur... https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/gaming/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/gaming/
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- capableweb 6y ago
  The keyword that seems to be missing from both of those links is "Windows". Seems they are running on Azure alright, but that they are using Windows doesn't seem to be so sure.
- bureado 6y ago
  This Xbox service runs on Kubernetes: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/building-xbox-game-streaming-with-site-reliability-best-practices/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/building-xbox-game-st... (I work on Azure, focusing on Linux and open source technologies)
- rpeden 6y ago
  At least some of the Halo games used Orleans as part of the multiplayer backend: https://github.com/dotnet/orleans https://github.com/dotnet/orleans Orleans can run on .NET Core now, but I don't believe .NET Core existed when those backends were first created. So they would've been running under the full .NET Framework on Windows.
z3t4 6y ago
I was on the Windows platform for 15 years and moved over to Linux about 6 years ago. One thing I miss from Windows Server is that it was very stable, updates never broke anything. If you got any updates that is. I think most people use Windows server because they are locked into Microsoft technology. I switched to Linux, and most importantly open source technology - in order to get out of the Windows ecosystem. I switched from an ASP stack to Node.JS, but it feels Microsoft is still stalking me, buying NPM, Github, releasing their own JavaScript flavor, releasing their own "open source" software bundled with proprietary add-ons, meanwhile suing Linux users for patent breach.
- Krustopolis 6y ago
  Could you please provide a link to some cases where Microsoft is suing Linux users for violating their patents? I thought they stopped that practice years ago.
  - yc12340 6y ago
    You mean, except for every major Android manufacturer paying exFAT tax? Microsoft certainly don't sue as much as they used, but that's because they are no longer developing as much groundbreaking tech. And when they do develop something, everyone avoids touching it with ten-foot pole (see also: "success" of UEFI on ARM devices).
    - Krustopolis 6y ago
      Microsoft made an official statement almost a year ago that it was OK to use exFAT, and they published the specs as well. https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/08/28/exfat-linux-kernel/ https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/08/28/exfat... I won't argue how groundbreaking their technology is of late, but in all fairness they have been much more open with their code.
- cosmotic 6y ago
  Similarly, I ran away from the Microsoft world because everyone was just 'drinking the koolaid'. I got out, into Python and django, and the problem was similar: everyone was drinking just a different koolaid. ASP.NET MVC C# with EF has got to be one of the most solid web frameworks I've ever used. Open-source fanatics refuse to listen about why it's great... even though it's open source now.
sandworm101 6y ago
>>The wackiest one I've come across is a CMS (Crematorium Management System). If anyone is looking for something to open source: Meet manager. Since the 90s it has been the go-to software for running competative swimming meets (timing, heats organization etc). It's a niche market but is alway a very broad and steady user base. (Similar software is also used for track and field meets.) http://activesupport.force.com/hytekswimming/articles/en_US/Article/Hy-Tek-System-Requirements http://activesupport.force.com/hytekswimming/articles/en_US/...
- sam_bristow 6y ago
  On a first skim of I thought you were saying there was crematorium software called "Meat Manager". I'm glad I was wrong.
  - blaser-waffle 6y ago
    We'll just call the repo MM, and let people figure it out themselves.
qubex 6y ago
I’ve never heard of a crematorium management system, but once when I was doing the rounds at my chemical factory I came across the technician who handled the burners for our boilers. It was October so he was doing a checkup before firing them up. I went in for some PR chit-chat. Unfortunately he took it as a genuine occasion for conversation (genuinely lovely guy, genuinely liked him, genuinely liked the conversations, but... well...) “Yeah yeah, you guys are great, calling me in to do preventative maintenance before firing ‘em up.” “Yeah, it’s protocol, I guess.” “Yeah yeah, but not everybody follow protocol y’know...” “Really?” “Yeah yeah, no... just came over from the crematorium.. they had a fat client inside and the burner conked out and we had to pull ‘em out half-done and let the chamber cool off so I could service the damned thing.” “...” “Yeah yeah, real bitch of a mornin’. Family there and everything. Waiting for the ashes, y’know?” “That must’ve been awkward.”“Yeah yeah, no no, they understood... you only do these things once, y’know... yeah yeah... bitch of a mornin’.”“Well I guess I’ll leave you to it then.” “Yeah yeah see you around."
dmw_ng 6y ago
You don't see it on HN much but the Windows world is still massive, and there are still plenty of ASP.NET folk around. I'd suppose you only have to take half a footstep outside the "pure Internet services" sphere to start bumping into lots of Windows, in pretty much any direction you happen to step. There are also whole industries where Windows has a particularly strong influence, e.g. (from experience) some parts of finance, petroleum, television, and I imagine things like render farms or other specialist graphics work that might have grown out of a once Windows-only desktop software cottage industry. I guess it's also important to say, much as you might find a zealous love for UNIX inside many (computer) engineering-led organizations, similar loyalty to Windows exists in many more (locally under-represented) industries for reasons that are less likely to be understood around here.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  > and I imagine things like render farms or other specialist graphics work that might have grown out of a once Windows-only desktop software cottage industry Much render farm/graphics work was once Mac territory but given Apple's ridiculous pricing and lack of server options besides stacked Mac Minis or support for NVidia stuff many have shifted away. Truly sad...
- icelancer 6y ago
  Yeah it's huge. My industry is 95% .NET. Lot of [LARGECO] use Outlook, which means the entire Office stack is dragged into use, which makes LDAP the logical choice, and Windows management of it, and then the rest of the tooling because why not...
- tpush 6y ago
  It bears repeating the the majority of software development happens on Windows (and I say that as a Mac guy).
- dkarl 6y ago
  In the mid 2000s I was working on scientific computing software running on RHEL workstations for a huge oil company. One day our customer inside this huge oil corp told us the entire worldwide company was standardizing on Windows for desktops and workstations. He said not to worry right away, because it would take them years to rip his team's lab full of Linux workstations out of his hands. I'm sure that was a massive, traumatic, and expensive transition that they would not repeat while the institutional memory of it remained, so I imagine they're still on Windows today.
martinald 6y ago
There's absolutely _millions_ of .NET web apps that target 'old' .NET framework out there. Migrating from .NET to .NET Core isn't trivial for most projects and can be very very challenging for others, to the point where it's probably not worth even attempting it. These apps will still be running for years or decades and Azure has by far the best Windows cloud experience.
rb808 6y ago
I worked on a derivatives system for a bank where we had a few thousand servers globally running distributed calculations. We chose C# over Java as it was more powerful at the time. Windows server was rock solid throughout, it also had the benefit of being integrated with Windows security. Now Linux you can run dotnet applications OK we'd probably choose that because its cheaper not because its better. Most server applications you just need a bare OS and run a process, it doesn't need much.
- JAlexoid 6y ago
  It C# the reason why we have to ingest CSVs attached to emails and use SMB/FTP(not sFTP, btw) to integrate with banks? Btw - "more powerful" is literally the ultimate subjective statement.
  - rb808 6y ago
    no
pdeuchler 6y ago
> I'm interested to know what the majority of the Windows machines are used for. Willing to bet it's SQL Server and Azure AD
input_sh 6y ago
As a sysadmin, I support way more Windows servers than I'd like, mostly because they run some .NET CMS (Content Management System in this case): Umbraco, Kentico, SiteCore etc. Most mind-blowing use case of a Windows server I've encountered was a server running nothing but nginx.
- mekster 6y ago
  How hard was it to maintain that nginx only Windows server compared to doing the same on Linux?
  - input_sh 6y ago
    Not much. Standard nginx commands work in cmd (like "nginx -t"), and most of the work I did was kicking out one of the production servers when new deployment was in order and letting it back in to serve requests after it finished. On the bad side, I just couldn't be bothered to create a script that would do that automatically, which resulted in one or two downtimes when I accidentally just tested the changes instead of reloading nginx for them to take affect ("nginx -s reload"). Repeated boring work lead to more carelessness, which would absolutely not happen if it was on any Linux system. I'd create an Ansible script(s) instead and wouldn't have to log into the servers manually for that one frequent use case.
    - mekster 6y ago
      One thing I wonder though, is that whether Windows has monitoring tools like Monit, so that incidents are automatically detected and reported.
fortran77 6y ago
Our old office was across the street from a crematorium and we had a public wi-fi named "xxxxxx Family Funeral Home" with a landing page with a link to a (fake) crematorium web control panel, complete with a fake live view of the cremation (it was actually just looped gif) You could adjust the temperature, the speed of the exhaust fans, etc. Anyway, we have Windows servers running in Azure because we do a lot of GPGPU work, and the NVIDIA/CUDA drivers work best in Windows.
mgbmtl 6y ago
re: Crematorium Management System, it might be possible to do that rather easily with a CRM? I develop mostly with CiviCRM (https://civicrm.org https://civicrm.org). It is contact-centric (rather than sales-centric), with good workflows for communications. You can add custom fields or custom activity types to track specific types of data or activities. However, my experience in those kind of niches, is that the client will likely be very non-technical, and will prefer to use what everyone else is using, even if it's vastly overpriced and locks their processes in place.
kryogen1c 6y ago
> I'm interested to know what the majority of the Windows machines are used for. I have IT experience in the "mom and pop" small-medium business world but am pretty Linux illiterate. I can buy a copy of Windows Server 2019, install the ActiveDirectory role, create a domain, and domain-join every computer that business has, and start doing all kinds of simple-but-effective policies like folder redirection+shadow copies, define password policies, start checking various compliance boxes, formalize a file share permission structure, enable Bitlocker, etc etc etc. Also, apps for nearly any business exist on Windows. Do Linux equivalents for any of this even exist? If they do, is there a large pool of competent admins you can hire for cheap in every non-megacity? The shift currently is from physical servers being owned by SMB to _the same architecture_ in the cloud. As the cloud admin market saturates, you'll see the % of Linux machines in the cloud drop and drop as SMB migrates their familiar setup to the commoditized cloud market. The bottom line is your average non-Silicon Valley user can't smoothly change between Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013. If you think a switch to Linux is possible in any timeframe less than decades, you are out of touch with the common computer user and their business needs. EDIT: i use SMB as an abbreviation for small-medium business https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_and_medium-sized_enterprises https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_and_medium-sized_enterpr...
- chasil 6y ago
  Most of what you are talking about was implemented in DCE, and there were ports to Linux but it never became popular. Microsoft certainly lifted a fair amount of this code. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Computing_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Computing_Environm... Interestingly, SMB is about to switch to Google's QUIC UDP, which is a great improvement.
  - contextfree 6y ago
    I think the GP meant SMB = "small and medium-sized business" rather than SMB = Server Message Block (the Windows file-sharing protocol)
    - kryogen1c 6y ago
aeyes 6y ago
Many of the services Azure offers run on Windows, these are probably included in the number of total machines. For example, the managed Postgres service runs on Windows which I didn't expect.
lwkl 6y ago
There is so much software written in Microsoft Access in my country that is basically irreplaceable. They have created interfaces to all the common industry software, vendors and devices and have all the common business processes built in. Big chains probably have these things integrated in their ERP and CRM or use a custom software solution. But for smaller chains in their respective industries I don't see how you move these programs in the cloud right now without a complete rewrite.
nimbius 6y ago
A few use cases come to mind: - Microsoft often bundles discounts for their their desktop and server licenses (used for AD and such) with Azure credits. Managers are under pressure to use the free service to deliver value, so teams are told to spin up things in azure as they see fit. reject the credits and reject the discount for the stuff you do use. - Office 365, Outlook, Xbox Live, Xbox Music and Video, the Microsoft website, MSN, Search, and Visual Studio Online all run in Azure either in whole or in part. If you think Microsoft doesnt dog-food their cloud to pump its numbers, you probably werent around when they bought out shared hosting providers "park website" clusters and converted them to IIS instances to inflate their Netcraft numbers against Apache.
- tracker1 6y ago
  Azure has some decent services, and a lot of people do run Windows beyond MS's own services. That said, I'm surprised the Linux users aren't closer to 75%, and bet they will be with kubernetes uptick over time for newer projects.
- rand49an 6y ago
  Office 365, Outlook and Xbox Live definitely aren't run on Azure.
thom 6y ago
I burned through a lot of Azure credit playing Football Manager on beefy instances, but presumably that's not representative.
kbenson 6y ago
My understanding is that if you're using Microsoft's Hypervisor product, the management console allows you to seamlessly deploy either to a VM on local hosts or in the Azure cloud (presumably through a VPN). I imagine that makes it easy to spin up those extra windows machines and licenses you need to support all the extra Active Directory add-ons you can get (inventory management, update management, SQL server to handle their data, etc) on Azure rather than procuring more hardware.
exdsq 6y ago
I’d recommend checking out .NET Core and F# or C# 8. Honestly .NET is becoming my go-to for anything beyond what a bash script can offer because it’s typed, functional or OO, has great frameworks for basic MVC sites or desktop apps, and the IDE on Windows is amazing while being able to compile cross-platform. It’s not just for enterprises!
- voltagex_ 6y ago
  The only thing that really shits me with .NET Core is that their idea of a "single executable" deployment is really a self-extracting zip file with an entire copy of the runtime.
  - tracker1 6y ago
    These days many of my deploy targets are docker images anyway, so not as much an issue... though looking at Rust with great interest. For anything less, I reach for Node first, only because I can get something done faster.
    - zeroc8 6y ago
      Then have a look at Deno. Best of both worlds.
tw04 6y ago
SQL? There are literally millions of production SQL databases out there and custom apps built on top of them - and while MS may have created a Linux port, there's no planet on which the average enterprise is moving to SQL on Linux without VERY good reason (and there currently isn't one that I can see outweighing the risk).
- greglindahl 6y ago
  SQL is a language. Perhaps you meant a particular implementation like Microsoft SQL Server?
  - tw04 6y ago
    Thank you for being pedantic. Clearly in an article focused on Microsoft, where I specifically call out Microsoft porting SQL to Linux, I meant the language and not the product. I'll be sure to type out "Microsoft SQL Server 2019™" because who would know what I'm talking about otherwise? Oh right, you and everyone else on HN.
- balnaphone 6y ago
  A company I consult for specializes in SQL Server applications. There is a significant push to Linux from both the largest customers, paying over 150k$/month for server licensing and hosting, and from the smallest companies, who are severely budget-conscious. The big customers have teams fluent in both Linux and Windows, and the smallest outsource their DBAs and sysadmins, so in both cases the cost is mostly a one-time development cost and maintenance goes on as usual. The medium-sized enterprises (100MM$ to 500MM$ annual revenue) are the ones who aren't looking at Linux. These are the ones with in-house tech support, who only know Windows. Maybe they are the average customers that won't switch over? Note that I'm only talking about cloud-hosted SQL Server installations. When you're buying the whole infrastructure stack, it's a different story. Also, this isn't the area I specialize in, so this is just a narrow observation, not a broad pattern.
  - tw04 6y ago
    I'm surprised to hear that to be quite honest. The feature gap is still pretty significant for any serious production deployment. MS is working hard to close the gap, but given basic enterprise features like database mirroring still aren't there - I'm not sure why any large enterprise would shift at this point. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux-editions-and-components-2019?view=sql-server-linux-2017#Unsupported https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux-...
darrmit 6y ago
The vast majority of Windows servers I’ve deployed in Azure are either domain controllers or legacy workloads that a customer wanted to just shift to Azure. Azure Domain Services and Azure AD still have some deployment complexities when compared to a scaled out domain.
gorgoiler 6y ago
The real skill I try to teach my pupils, when joining top down ICT skills to bottom up CS / hacker skills, is to be able to re use existing tools in new and creative ways. This is especially applicable if you learn a bunch of generic “everything is a text file” hacker skills, maybe with a little code on top. Could you manage the crematorium using YAML files edited in GitHub? Maybe. Any collaborative tool with tagging can usually be beaten hard enough with a hammer to turn it into something useful in a specific domain. We make pens and paper and do all sorts of specific business with these generic tools. Encouraging the generic use of computers might seem like dragging us back to the 1980s, but it’s how these tools were meant to be used!
- jamieweb 6y ago
  I definitely agree with you in regards to the "everything is a text file" thing, but the average computer user doesn't know how to properly utilise text files and manage them effectively. This is similar to the fact that basic knowledge of file systems and file formats is lacking in many modern teenagers, because this is all abstracted away by smartphone apps and cloud storage. As a tech guy, I'd love to run the crematorium using YAML files in GitHub, but the reality is that the target audience for the system is Funeral Directors and Cremation Assistants, so it needs to be a non-technical user interface.
throwaway888abc 6y ago
Legacy sharepoint ?
tracker1 6y ago
A lot of applications use commercial components, that tend to be tethered to windows security models for registration/activation reasons. Many internal apps likely don't need to target windows, but may have windows-isms baked in for a number of historical reasons. There are also a lot of .Net apps tethered to windows more out of heritage, most are easy enough to port, others much harder, it varies and there's a lot of apps unlikely to receive the effort to even explore the feasibility of migration to either mono or dotnet-core.
alexchantavy 6y ago
Identity management with Active Directory is probably the biggest plus of a Windows environment; there's a saying that goes something like "in the end, every identity system ends up trying to be AD". Sure, you can run OpenLDAP on Linux and effectively get a domain controller, but the ready-to-go nature of AD on Windows Server is very compelling, especially for larger businesses.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  +1. Did a lot with LDAP auth in an all-linux environment but AD is much easier, IMO. I'm not even much of a Windows guy, but the pools documentation/youtube vids/number of people to ask the question to are way deeper.
- himinlomax 6y ago
  Don't use openldap, use FreeIPA (aka RedHat Identity Management). It covers most of AD's functions except GPOs, such as kerberos, HBAC, PKI, 2FA, HA, joining a client to a domain and so on. Nice GUI, decent CLI, installer takes care of everything on the client.
Arelius 6y ago
I use a lot of Windows machines in the cloud as build machines for video games.
RyanGoosling 6y ago
.NET, also IIS and Windows 10 Server UI is more useable than a Linux server console in my opinion. I used to be a Linux server guy, but then I started using Windows Server and IIS and never went back and I don’t think I’ll ever want to go back.
fragmede 6y ago
> I'm interested to know what the majority of the Windows machines are used for. I'll bet that there's a huge number of virtual desktop machines. Instead of having to push a really fat windows disk image with all the apps installed, to all workstations, those workstations run remote desktop, and connect to a windows VM running in Azure.
def8cefe 6y ago
>The wackiest one I've come across is a CMS (Crematorium Management System). https://www.mortware.com/ https://www.mortware.com/
bashwizard 6y ago
I've built a few pentest labs with AD and Windows VMs but that's it.
fulafel 6y ago
Running MS own services like Teams and Office359?

GordonS 6y ago

Microsoft 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 ago
I 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 ago
  It'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 ago

Other than bespoke enterprise apps, my guess would be the majority of the remaining Windows machines run SQL server.

sitkack 6y ago
Doesn't SQL server run under Wine or https://reactos.org/wiki/ReactOS https://reactos.org/wiki/ReactOS ?
- josteink 6y ago
  Microsoft officially support SQL Server on Linux and Docker now: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-downloads https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-downlo... No need for emulation.
  - tracker1 6y ago
    The docker images have been great... can spin up a fresh install and deploy schema and config in a couple minutes for local development.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- topspin 6y ago
  Microsoft supports SQL server on Linux. No need for Wine.
- flatiron 6y ago
  If you have wine in your production stack you gotta be doing something wrong. I did have some reporting tools run in Dosbox though as we couldn’t get the printer working without it. And it printed the reports and OCR’d them in because every time someone tried to rewrite that reporting tool they never got the same numbers and nobody wanted to be the one who answered the question as to “well whose right”
- wwright 6y ago
  I would bet that the license doesn’t encourage that, and SQL Server is the sort of software where the license is king.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago

cameronbrown 6y ago

Virtual desktops or straight up on-prem to cloud migration might be my guess. If big companies can avoid it, why pay the cost of a rewrite? > Crematorium Management System Genuine question: why can't you use Microsoft Access or G Suite for this? Seems like the canonical data entry use case these products are designed for.

willtim 6y ago
A Crematorium Management System built in Microsoft Access is still a Crematorium Management System.

flohofwoe 6y ago

I don't have actual numbers obviously, but I'd imagine that a lot of Xbox multiplayer game backends and probably all of Xbox Live is running on Azure Windows servers, and Xbox is a pretty big platform by number of users. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/11/microsoft-wants-azure-to-be-the-multiplayer-server-solution-for-every-platform/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/11/microsoft-wants-azur... https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/gaming/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/gaming/

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
capableweb 6y ago
The keyword that seems to be missing from both of those links is "Windows". Seems they are running on Azure alright, but that they are using Windows doesn't seem to be so sure.
bureado 6y ago
This Xbox service runs on Kubernetes: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/building-xbox-game-streaming-with-site-reliability-best-practices/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/building-xbox-game-st... (I work on Azure, focusing on Linux and open source technologies)
rpeden 6y ago
At least some of the Halo games used Orleans as part of the multiplayer backend: https://github.com/dotnet/orleans https://github.com/dotnet/orleans Orleans can run on .NET Core now, but I don't believe .NET Core existed when those backends were first created. So they would've been running under the full .NET Framework on Windows.

z3t4 6y ago

I was on the Windows platform for 15 years and moved over to Linux about 6 years ago. One thing I miss from Windows Server is that it was very stable, updates never broke anything. If you got any updates that is. I think most people use Windows server because they are locked into Microsoft technology. I switched to Linux, and most importantly open source technology - in order to get out of the Windows ecosystem. I switched from an ASP stack to Node.JS, but it feels Microsoft is still stalking me, buying NPM, Github, releasing their own JavaScript flavor, releasing their own "open source" software bundled with proprietary add-ons, meanwhile suing Linux users for patent breach.

Krustopolis 6y ago
Could you please provide a link to some cases where Microsoft is suing Linux users for violating their patents? I thought they stopped that practice years ago.
- yc12340 6y ago
  You mean, except for every major Android manufacturer paying exFAT tax? Microsoft certainly don't sue as much as they used, but that's because they are no longer developing as much groundbreaking tech. And when they do develop something, everyone avoids touching it with ten-foot pole (see also: "success" of UEFI on ARM devices).
  - Krustopolis 6y ago
    Microsoft made an official statement almost a year ago that it was OK to use exFAT, and they published the specs as well. https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/08/28/exfat-linux-kernel/ https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/08/28/exfat... I won't argue how groundbreaking their technology is of late, but in all fairness they have been much more open with their code.
cosmotic 6y ago
Similarly, I ran away from the Microsoft world because everyone was just 'drinking the koolaid'. I got out, into Python and django, and the problem was similar: everyone was drinking just a different koolaid. ASP.NET MVC C# with EF has got to be one of the most solid web frameworks I've ever used. Open-source fanatics refuse to listen about why it's great... even though it's open source now.

sandworm101 6y ago

>>The wackiest one I've come across is a CMS (Crematorium Management System). If anyone is looking for something to open source: Meet manager. Since the 90s it has been the go-to software for running competative swimming meets (timing, heats organization etc). It's a niche market but is alway a very broad and steady user base. (Similar software is also used for track and field meets.) http://activesupport.force.com/hytekswimming/articles/en_US/Article/Hy-Tek-System-Requirements http://activesupport.force.com/hytekswimming/articles/en_US/...

sam_bristow 6y ago
On a first skim of I thought you were saying there was crematorium software called "Meat Manager". I'm glad I was wrong.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  We'll just call the repo MM, and let people figure it out themselves.

qubex 6y ago

I’ve never heard of a crematorium management system, but once when I was doing the rounds at my chemical factory I came across the technician who handled the burners for our boilers. It was October so he was doing a checkup before firing them up. I went in for some PR chit-chat. Unfortunately he took it as a genuine occasion for conversation (genuinely lovely guy, genuinely liked him, genuinely liked the conversations, but... well...) “Yeah yeah, you guys are great, calling me in to do preventative maintenance before firing ‘em up.” “Yeah, it’s protocol, I guess.” “Yeah yeah, but not everybody follow protocol y’know...” “Really?” “Yeah yeah, no... just came over from the crematorium.. they had a fat client inside and the burner conked out and we had to pull ‘em out half-done and let the chamber cool off so I could service the damned thing.” “...” “Yeah yeah, real bitch of a mornin’. Family there and everything. Waiting for the ashes, y’know?” “That must’ve been awkward.”“Yeah yeah, no no, they understood... you only do these things once, y’know... yeah yeah... bitch of a mornin’.”“Well I guess I’ll leave you to it then.” “Yeah yeah see you around."

dmw_ng 6y ago

You don't see it on HN much but the Windows world is still massive, and there are still plenty of ASP.NET folk around. I'd suppose you only have to take half a footstep outside the "pure Internet services" sphere to start bumping into lots of Windows, in pretty much any direction you happen to step. There are also whole industries where Windows has a particularly strong influence, e.g. (from experience) some parts of finance, petroleum, television, and I imagine things like render farms or other specialist graphics work that might have grown out of a once Windows-only desktop software cottage industry. I guess it's also important to say, much as you might find a zealous love for UNIX inside many (computer) engineering-led organizations, similar loyalty to Windows exists in many more (locally under-represented) industries for reasons that are less likely to be understood around here.

mschuster91 6y ago
> and I imagine things like render farms or other specialist graphics work that might have grown out of a once Windows-only desktop software cottage industry Much render farm/graphics work was once Mac territory but given Apple's ridiculous pricing and lack of server options besides stacked Mac Minis or support for NVidia stuff many have shifted away. Truly sad...
icelancer 6y ago
Yeah it's huge. My industry is 95% .NET. Lot of [LARGECO] use Outlook, which means the entire Office stack is dragged into use, which makes LDAP the logical choice, and Windows management of it, and then the rest of the tooling because why not...
tpush 6y ago
It bears repeating the the majority of software development happens on Windows (and I say that as a Mac guy).
dkarl 6y ago
In the mid 2000s I was working on scientific computing software running on RHEL workstations for a huge oil company. One day our customer inside this huge oil corp told us the entire worldwide company was standardizing on Windows for desktops and workstations. He said not to worry right away, because it would take them years to rip his team's lab full of Linux workstations out of his hands. I'm sure that was a massive, traumatic, and expensive transition that they would not repeat while the institutional memory of it remained, so I imagine they're still on Windows today.

martinald 6y ago

There's absolutely _millions_ of .NET web apps that target 'old' .NET framework out there. Migrating from .NET to .NET Core isn't trivial for most projects and can be very very challenging for others, to the point where it's probably not worth even attempting it. These apps will still be running for years or decades and Azure has by far the best Windows cloud experience.

rb808 6y ago

I worked on a derivatives system for a bank where we had a few thousand servers globally running distributed calculations. We chose C# over Java as it was more powerful at the time. Windows server was rock solid throughout, it also had the benefit of being integrated with Windows security. Now Linux you can run dotnet applications OK we'd probably choose that because its cheaper not because its better. Most server applications you just need a bare OS and run a process, it doesn't need much.

JAlexoid 6y ago
It C# the reason why we have to ingest CSVs attached to emails and use SMB/FTP(not sFTP, btw) to integrate with banks? Btw - "more powerful" is literally the ultimate subjective statement.
- rb808 6y ago
  no

pdeuchler 6y ago

> I'm interested to know what the majority of the Windows machines are used for. Willing to bet it's SQL Server and Azure AD

input_sh 6y ago

As a sysadmin, I support way more Windows servers than I'd like, mostly because they run some .NET CMS (Content Management System in this case): Umbraco, Kentico, SiteCore etc. Most mind-blowing use case of a Windows server I've encountered was a server running nothing but nginx.

mekster 6y ago
How hard was it to maintain that nginx only Windows server compared to doing the same on Linux?
- input_sh 6y ago
  Not much. Standard nginx commands work in cmd (like "nginx -t"), and most of the work I did was kicking out one of the production servers when new deployment was in order and letting it back in to serve requests after it finished. On the bad side, I just couldn't be bothered to create a script that would do that automatically, which resulted in one or two downtimes when I accidentally just tested the changes instead of reloading nginx for them to take affect ("nginx -s reload"). Repeated boring work lead to more carelessness, which would absolutely not happen if it was on any Linux system. I'd create an Ansible script(s) instead and wouldn't have to log into the servers manually for that one frequent use case.
  - mekster 6y ago
    One thing I wonder though, is that whether Windows has monitoring tools like Monit, so that incidents are automatically detected and reported.

fortran77 6y ago

Our old office was across the street from a crematorium and we had a public wi-fi named "xxxxxx Family Funeral Home" with a landing page with a link to a (fake) crematorium web control panel, complete with a fake live view of the cremation (it was actually just looped gif) You could adjust the temperature, the speed of the exhaust fans, etc. Anyway, we have Windows servers running in Azure because we do a lot of GPGPU work, and the NVIDIA/CUDA drivers work best in Windows.

mgbmtl 6y ago

re: Crematorium Management System, it might be possible to do that rather easily with a CRM? I develop mostly with CiviCRM (https://civicrm.org https://civicrm.org). It is contact-centric (rather than sales-centric), with good workflows for communications. You can add custom fields or custom activity types to track specific types of data or activities. However, my experience in those kind of niches, is that the client will likely be very non-technical, and will prefer to use what everyone else is using, even if it's vastly overpriced and locks their processes in place.

kryogen1c 6y ago

> I'm interested to know what the majority of the Windows machines are used for. I have IT experience in the "mom and pop" small-medium business world but am pretty Linux illiterate. I can buy a copy of Windows Server 2019, install the ActiveDirectory role, create a domain, and domain-join every computer that business has, and start doing all kinds of simple-but-effective policies like folder redirection+shadow copies, define password policies, start checking various compliance boxes, formalize a file share permission structure, enable Bitlocker, etc etc etc. Also, apps for nearly any business exist on Windows. Do Linux equivalents for any of this even exist? If they do, is there a large pool of competent admins you can hire for cheap in every non-megacity? The shift currently is from physical servers being owned by SMB to _the same architecture_ in the cloud. As the cloud admin market saturates, you'll see the % of Linux machines in the cloud drop and drop as SMB migrates their familiar setup to the commoditized cloud market. The bottom line is your average non-Silicon Valley user can't smoothly change between Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013. If you think a switch to Linux is possible in any timeframe less than decades, you are out of touch with the common computer user and their business needs. EDIT: i use SMB as an abbreviation for small-medium business https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_and_medium-sized_enterprises https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_and_medium-sized_enterpr...

chasil 6y ago
Most of what you are talking about was implemented in DCE, and there were ports to Linux but it never became popular. Microsoft certainly lifted a fair amount of this code. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Computing_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Computing_Environm... Interestingly, SMB is about to switch to Google's QUIC UDP, which is a great improvement.
- contextfree 6y ago
  I think the GP meant SMB = "small and medium-sized business" rather than SMB = Server Message Block (the Windows file-sharing protocol)
  - kryogen1c 6y ago

aeyes 6y ago

Many of the services Azure offers run on Windows, these are probably included in the number of total machines. For example, the managed Postgres service runs on Windows which I didn't expect.

lwkl 6y ago

There is so much software written in Microsoft Access in my country that is basically irreplaceable. They have created interfaces to all the common industry software, vendors and devices and have all the common business processes built in. Big chains probably have these things integrated in their ERP and CRM or use a custom software solution. But for smaller chains in their respective industries I don't see how you move these programs in the cloud right now without a complete rewrite.

nimbius 6y ago

A few use cases come to mind: - Microsoft often bundles discounts for their their desktop and server licenses (used for AD and such) with Azure credits. Managers are under pressure to use the free service to deliver value, so teams are told to spin up things in azure as they see fit. reject the credits and reject the discount for the stuff you do use. - Office 365, Outlook, Xbox Live, Xbox Music and Video, the Microsoft website, MSN, Search, and Visual Studio Online all run in Azure either in whole or in part. If you think Microsoft doesnt dog-food their cloud to pump its numbers, you probably werent around when they bought out shared hosting providers "park website" clusters and converted them to IIS instances to inflate their Netcraft numbers against Apache.

tracker1 6y ago
Azure has some decent services, and a lot of people do run Windows beyond MS's own services. That said, I'm surprised the Linux users aren't closer to 75%, and bet they will be with kubernetes uptick over time for newer projects.
rand49an 6y ago
Office 365, Outlook and Xbox Live definitely aren't run on Azure.

thom 6y ago

I burned through a lot of Azure credit playing Football Manager on beefy instances, but presumably that's not representative.

kbenson 6y ago

My understanding is that if you're using Microsoft's Hypervisor product, the management console allows you to seamlessly deploy either to a VM on local hosts or in the Azure cloud (presumably through a VPN). I imagine that makes it easy to spin up those extra windows machines and licenses you need to support all the extra Active Directory add-ons you can get (inventory management, update management, SQL server to handle their data, etc) on Azure rather than procuring more hardware.

exdsq 6y ago

I’d recommend checking out .NET Core and F# or C# 8. Honestly .NET is becoming my go-to for anything beyond what a bash script can offer because it’s typed, functional or OO, has great frameworks for basic MVC sites or desktop apps, and the IDE on Windows is amazing while being able to compile cross-platform. It’s not just for enterprises!

voltagex_ 6y ago
The only thing that really shits me with .NET Core is that their idea of a "single executable" deployment is really a self-extracting zip file with an entire copy of the runtime.
- tracker1 6y ago
  These days many of my deploy targets are docker images anyway, so not as much an issue... though looking at Rust with great interest. For anything less, I reach for Node first, only because I can get something done faster.
  - zeroc8 6y ago
    Then have a look at Deno. Best of both worlds.

tw04 6y ago

SQL? There are literally millions of production SQL databases out there and custom apps built on top of them - and while MS may have created a Linux port, there's no planet on which the average enterprise is moving to SQL on Linux without VERY good reason (and there currently isn't one that I can see outweighing the risk).

greglindahl 6y ago
SQL is a language. Perhaps you meant a particular implementation like Microsoft SQL Server?
- tw04 6y ago
  Thank you for being pedantic. Clearly in an article focused on Microsoft, where I specifically call out Microsoft porting SQL to Linux, I meant the language and not the product. I'll be sure to type out "Microsoft SQL Server 2019™" because who would know what I'm talking about otherwise? Oh right, you and everyone else on HN.
balnaphone 6y ago
A company I consult for specializes in SQL Server applications. There is a significant push to Linux from both the largest customers, paying over 150k$/month for server licensing and hosting, and from the smallest companies, who are severely budget-conscious. The big customers have teams fluent in both Linux and Windows, and the smallest outsource their DBAs and sysadmins, so in both cases the cost is mostly a one-time development cost and maintenance goes on as usual. The medium-sized enterprises (100MM$ to 500MM$ annual revenue) are the ones who aren't looking at Linux. These are the ones with in-house tech support, who only know Windows. Maybe they are the average customers that won't switch over? Note that I'm only talking about cloud-hosted SQL Server installations. When you're buying the whole infrastructure stack, it's a different story. Also, this isn't the area I specialize in, so this is just a narrow observation, not a broad pattern.
- tw04 6y ago
  I'm surprised to hear that to be quite honest. The feature gap is still pretty significant for any serious production deployment. MS is working hard to close the gap, but given basic enterprise features like database mirroring still aren't there - I'm not sure why any large enterprise would shift at this point. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux-editions-and-components-2019?view=sql-server-linux-2017#Unsupported https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux-...

darrmit 6y ago

The vast majority of Windows servers I’ve deployed in Azure are either domain controllers or legacy workloads that a customer wanted to just shift to Azure. Azure Domain Services and Azure AD still have some deployment complexities when compared to a scaled out domain.

gorgoiler 6y ago

The real skill I try to teach my pupils, when joining top down ICT skills to bottom up CS / hacker skills, is to be able to re use existing tools in new and creative ways. This is especially applicable if you learn a bunch of generic “everything is a text file” hacker skills, maybe with a little code on top. Could you manage the crematorium using YAML files edited in GitHub? Maybe. Any collaborative tool with tagging can usually be beaten hard enough with a hammer to turn it into something useful in a specific domain. We make pens and paper and do all sorts of specific business with these generic tools. Encouraging the generic use of computers might seem like dragging us back to the 1980s, but it’s how these tools were meant to be used!

jamieweb 6y ago
I definitely agree with you in regards to the "everything is a text file" thing, but the average computer user doesn't know how to properly utilise text files and manage them effectively. This is similar to the fact that basic knowledge of file systems and file formats is lacking in many modern teenagers, because this is all abstracted away by smartphone apps and cloud storage. As a tech guy, I'd love to run the crematorium using YAML files in GitHub, but the reality is that the target audience for the system is Funeral Directors and Cremation Assistants, so it needs to be a non-technical user interface.

throwaway888abc 6y ago

Legacy sharepoint ?

tracker1 6y ago

A lot of applications use commercial components, that tend to be tethered to windows security models for registration/activation reasons. Many internal apps likely don't need to target windows, but may have windows-isms baked in for a number of historical reasons. There are also a lot of .Net apps tethered to windows more out of heritage, most are easy enough to port, others much harder, it varies and there's a lot of apps unlikely to receive the effort to even explore the feasibility of migration to either mono or dotnet-core.

alexchantavy 6y ago

Identity management with Active Directory is probably the biggest plus of a Windows environment; there's a saying that goes something like "in the end, every identity system ends up trying to be AD". Sure, you can run OpenLDAP on Linux and effectively get a domain controller, but the ready-to-go nature of AD on Windows Server is very compelling, especially for larger businesses.

blaser-waffle 6y ago
+1. Did a lot with LDAP auth in an all-linux environment but AD is much easier, IMO. I'm not even much of a Windows guy, but the pools documentation/youtube vids/number of people to ask the question to are way deeper.
himinlomax 6y ago
Don't use openldap, use FreeIPA (aka RedHat Identity Management). It covers most of AD's functions except GPOs, such as kerberos, HBAC, PKI, 2FA, HA, joining a client to a domain and so on. Nice GUI, decent CLI, installer takes care of everything on the client.

Arelius 6y ago

I use a lot of Windows machines in the cloud as build machines for video games.

RyanGoosling 6y ago

.NET, also IIS and Windows 10 Server UI is more useable than a Linux server console in my opinion. I used to be a Linux server guy, but then I started using Windows Server and IIS and never went back and I don’t think I’ll ever want to go back.

fragmede 6y ago

> I'm interested to know what the majority of the Windows machines are used for. I'll bet that there's a huge number of virtual desktop machines. Instead of having to push a really fat windows disk image with all the apps installed, to all workstations, those workstations run remote desktop, and connect to a windows VM running in Azure.

def8cefe 6y ago

>The wackiest one I've come across is a CMS (Crematorium Management System). https://www.mortware.com/ https://www.mortware.com/

bashwizard 6y ago

I've built a few pentest labs with AD and Windows VMs but that's it.

fulafel 6y ago

Running MS own services like Teams and Office359?