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>Windows' legacy x86 hyper-focus There have been multiple consumer ARM Windows products on the market for the last 9 years, I'd say Windows (client, at least)

>Windows' legacy x86 hyper-focus There have been multiple consumer ARM Windows products on the market for the last 9 years, I'd say Windows (client, at least) on ARM64 is as solid as its x64 counterpart

acdha 5y ago
I’m aware, but everyone I know who had one of those ended up complaining about software compatibility issues. In the context of Azure, I’d imagine a lot of their customers would be especially risk averse in this regard.
- Kipters 5y ago
  Most of the time they're complaining about not being able to use x86 (in Windows RT's case) or x64 (until recently) pre-existing applications, and there's no native ARM/ARM64 version of said app. In the context of Azure, if someone wants to deploy on an ARM instance, I'd expect them to be able to build a native ARM64 version of whatever they're building.
  - acdha 5y ago
    > In the context of Azure, if someone wants to deploy on an ARM instance, I'd expect them to be able to build a native ARM64 version of whatever they're building. Have you really had the experience that a large organization has the ability to recompile everything they run? Most will have a lot of code which is provided as binaries by a vendor, and their in-house code almost certainly has dependencies and optimizations which will need to be dealt with & revalidated. No, none of that is unsolvable but it means adoption is much harder than, say, changing an RDS instance type and you'd be taking on all of the support rather than the cloud provider's much larger team. That's what I referred to in my original comment — in my experience, the average Azure user works at a Windows-heavy enterprise IT shop where those issues would be common. That doesn't mean that I don't expect ARM servers to happen there — Microsoft announced it was coming years ago, after all — but that it's going to be slow since the upfront investment will likely have slower adoption.
    - Kipters 5y ago
      Microsoft themselves said the majority of VMs on Azure run Linux, not Windows. About the ability to recompile, if you can't build ARM software what's the point of using ARM instances? You don't need cross-architecture compatibility like you need it on the desktop version, which is what consumer complain about when talking about Windows on ARM
      - acdha 5y ago
        The point is that it doesn’t matter if you could see a 20% price performance boost if your code doesn’t run on that architecture. If you’re using software which hasn’t been compiled for ARM, you’re not asking your cloud provider for that architecture and they’re not seeing the volume needed to profitably offer it. I think AWS has successfully been pushing this because they know they’ll see that initial volume from people seeking savings on their own managed services and things like Lambda which are easy to switch, and that will fuel interest in switching other services which require more work.

acdha 5y ago

I’m aware, but everyone I know who had one of those ended up complaining about software compatibility issues. In the context of Azure, I’d imagine a lot of their customers would be especially risk averse in this regard.

Kipters 5y ago
Most of the time they're complaining about not being able to use x86 (in Windows RT's case) or x64 (until recently) pre-existing applications, and there's no native ARM/ARM64 version of said app. In the context of Azure, if someone wants to deploy on an ARM instance, I'd expect them to be able to build a native ARM64 version of whatever they're building.
- acdha 5y ago
  > In the context of Azure, if someone wants to deploy on an ARM instance, I'd expect them to be able to build a native ARM64 version of whatever they're building. Have you really had the experience that a large organization has the ability to recompile everything they run? Most will have a lot of code which is provided as binaries by a vendor, and their in-house code almost certainly has dependencies and optimizations which will need to be dealt with & revalidated. No, none of that is unsolvable but it means adoption is much harder than, say, changing an RDS instance type and you'd be taking on all of the support rather than the cloud provider's much larger team. That's what I referred to in my original comment — in my experience, the average Azure user works at a Windows-heavy enterprise IT shop where those issues would be common. That doesn't mean that I don't expect ARM servers to happen there — Microsoft announced it was coming years ago, after all — but that it's going to be slow since the upfront investment will likely have slower adoption.
  - Kipters 5y ago
    Microsoft themselves said the majority of VMs on Azure run Linux, not Windows. About the ability to recompile, if you can't build ARM software what's the point of using ARM instances? You don't need cross-architecture compatibility like you need it on the desktop version, which is what consumer complain about when talking about Windows on ARM
    - acdha 5y ago
      The point is that it doesn’t matter if you could see a 20% price performance boost if your code doesn’t run on that architecture. If you’re using software which hasn’t been compiled for ARM, you’re not asking your cloud provider for that architecture and they’re not seeing the volume needed to profitably offer it. I think AWS has successfully been pushing this because they know they’ll see that initial volume from people seeking savings on their own managed services and things like Lambda which are easy to switch, and that will fuel interest in switching other services which require more work.