10 ms·

Microsoft: Linux Is the Top Operating System on Azure Today

122 points by jaboutboul 2y ago

wslh 2y ago
Isn't that obvious? It doesn't matter if Microsoft is Microsoft, Azure is a cloud service and in the cloud Linux (server(s)) is/are the winner(s). The only thing that could compete with that are virtual/remote Windows desktops but I really cannot think that they are used in all industries like Linux servers.
commercialnix 2y ago
Windows is a pile of shit and only managed to stick around by bundling an actual Linux kernel in WSL2 to cling to relevance with software developers and ultimately because retards who want to play-pretend they are IT and shouldn't be anywhere near computers beyond muh video games keep installing it everywhere.
surfingdino 2y ago
That must annoy Mr Cutler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler
- lostmsu 2y ago
  According to that wiki he does not work on Azure since 2012
  - surfingdino 2y ago
    According to the same page, he is not a fan of Unix. I assume he is not a fan of Linux by extension.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sirjaz 2y ago
This article doesn't talk about actual VMs/instances running in Azure. Also, so many new service devs only target Linux, and Windows is an after thought. No wonder 60% of the market place is linux.
- klaas- 2y ago
  the actual talk (video in article) says more than 60% of VM vcpus are from linux VMs, it does not talk about instances though. But I would expect Linux to be a lot of very small and very large VMs :)
loughnane 2y ago
When OS became a product input rather than the product itself, things changed
jaboutboul 2y ago
Hey everyone. We put in lots of efforts to make sure that Linux runs really well on Azure and that you have a great experience. Glad this got some traction and glad to answer any questions.
- seniorThrowaway 2y ago
  My experience was that the Linux VM agents used to cause frequent problems but in the time I was using Azure I did see great improvements in them, kudos for that. I'd like to see less churn and breaking changes in agents and in Azure in general, but that seems to be a problem common to all major clouds.
- benterix 2y ago
  > Glad this got some traction Yes, we know.[0] [0] https://www.kickscondor.com/satya-nadella-'reads''games'-hacker-news/ https://www.kickscondor.com/satya-nadella-'reads''games'-hac...
  - HDThoreaun 2y ago
    I really fail to see how interacting with the community to see how we feel could possibly be negative. Sure theyre doing it to push their product, but theyre also doing it to see where they need to improve.
    - benterix 2y ago
      I don't see it as particularly positive or negative, just something worth knowing.
  - jaboutboul 2y ago
    Thanks for posting that. This post had nothing to do with Satya nor did he or anyone aside from myself and a couple other team mates see it before posting.
- benreesman 2y ago
  Congratulations on the milestone! Is there a paved path for bringing up NixOS on Azure VMs? I haven’t looked hard yet, but I’m about to so if this is a known thing I’d be grateful for any pointers.
jmclnx 2y ago
Honest Question, is Azure itself a Linux System. Or are these Linuxes running on top of some version of Windows ?
- klaas- 2y ago
  so the "real" azure nodes are some kind of special Windows+HyperV but for example their accelerator cards are linuxes: https://cfp.all-systems-go.io/media/all-systems-go-2023/submissions/7URRNC/resources/ASG_2023_Microsoft_Azure_Boost_i8m559R.pdf https://cfp.all-systems-go.io/media/all-systems-go-2023/subm...
- daxfohl 2y ago
  I was there three years ago. Most (possibly all) of what was running on bare metal was Windows/Hyper-V. Some Azure service backends ran on Linux VMs; AKS backend for instance was on Linux I believe. Most were Windows/C# though. I know there was some initiative to allow for Linux bare metal for some internal services, I think to allow for running k8s clusters without the extra hypervisor layer(?), but it was still WIP when I left.
- jaboutboul 2y ago
  The Azure infrastructure, as I assume most hyperscale infrastructures are, is hybrid depending on the service. Service owners typically have a fair amount of liberty in deciding how they architect their service and what they use underneath it.
- delfinom 2y ago
  Microsoft uses a Windows derived host OS running Hyper-V for the VMs. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-os-platform-blog/azure-host-os-cloud-host/ba-p/3709528?WT.mc_id=modinfra-0000-thmaure https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-os-platform-b...
  - lyu07282 2y ago
    They always liked to dogfeed their own stuff even when it makes no sense whatsoever
tonymet 2y ago
IMO this is more of a distribution problem than an OS problem. If MS did a better job at supporting headless Windows distros to compete with Debian (and similar linux) distros, it would be more popular. For 9/ 10 tasks, it's way easier to spin up Debian , install a web / db / app server and have a running solution. With windows you're still running through dozens of MSI packages, setup screens. It's too inconsistent. There are workarounds to this, but they are not as mature & familiar as the corresponding linux setup. It's the UX not the platform.
- what-the-grump 2y ago
  Why is it a problem at all or is being frame like a problem? Microsoft can easily drop a fork of windows, slam out all of the com crap, leave .net core and include some IIS, but why, you already have someone doing it in Linux.
  - everforward 2y ago
    It makes Windows hard to operate in a “servers are cattle, not pets” environment, though my experience is limited so I’m open to corrections. That then makes Windows less appealing to the infra-as-code crowd, which is growing to be “almost everyone” these days. It’s not just having an image with those things, it’s the entire surrounding ecosystem. Eg my experience with exe or msi installers is that using them without a GUI ranges from “difficult to find the right CLI switches” to “just not gonna happen”. Also, I think a lot of that com crap is used by Powershell, so gutting it also means giving up CLI access to stuff.
    - atomicnumber3 2y ago
      "my experience with exe or msi installers is that using them without a GUI ranges from “difficult to find the right CLI switches” to “just not gonna happen”." This was my student job during college :) wrapping installers in scripts so they'd install headlessly. My favorite part was that windows would need to be rebooted CONSTANTLY. Seriously. Provisioning a new box for some environments would result in TEN OR MORE reboots depending on exactly what shitware you had picked to install. And by shitware I do of course mean exorbiently-expensively-licensed academic/scientific software. The more scientific it was, somehow the exponentially worse the installer experience would be. We had one package where we were literally forced to cram in a step where you would literally pick up the phone and call IT and someone would come over and plug a USB in while the install proceeded. The software was able to be network-licensed but only post-install, the installer itself never got the memo and wanted the usb to be physically present on the box during install. Death by a thousand cuts (and some big gashes), Windows is just not built to work headlessly/scriptably, period. And trying to make it work like that takes tremendous investment, constant babysitting, and it's still fairly shitty even in the end. Meanwhile we just apt install shit in dockerfiles and it just works.
clarkevans 2y ago
Thank you @jaboutboul. I appreciate that Linux works so well on Azure. A substantial problem for the Linux ecosystem on Azure is that Azure Files is not POSIX compliant. With Container Apps, ephemeral storage is POSIX compliant. However, if you mount a persistent Azure Files file system and use it directly, some applications break. One workaround is to use rsync in the background to replicate data from ephemeral to Azure Files, but we can lose data this way (and ephemeral storage is limited to 8 GiB). It'd also be nice if "Consumption Only" container apps would have more than 4GB of memory. It's so nice to use these.
- klaas- 2y ago
  you can use azure files nfs, that should be posix compliant, but it comes without auth or encryption ... :)
  - phatfish 2y ago
    The NFS protocol does not support all the functions of a "native" filesystem running on a block device. NFS is fine for configuration files or read only. But workloads that do any sort of intensive writes will probably not like NFS, from SQLite up. The newest NFS versions might fix some of the issues around caching that cause problems for write operations though.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - clarkevans 2y ago
    NFS requires a custom VNet. Using a fully managed environment is important to us.
- jaboutboul 2y ago
  I've forwarded this feedback to both teams. Can you email or message me so that I can loop you into the product teams?
jdoliner 2y ago
It's the year of Linux on someone else's Desktop.
- odo1242 2y ago
  *server
  - quaintdev 2y ago
    That has been true for decades?
jeffrallen 2y ago
...or at least the top one that's, you know, not in a BSOD crash loop.
- jaboutboul 2y ago
  LOL
tracker1 2y ago
I'm honestly surprised it's not much higher than "over 60%". I know that a lot of orgs have done lift+shift for Windows services on Azure... Considering many, many things developed for .Net are trivial to update/port to newer versions on Linux/Docker, I'm just surprised more haven't done so.
- sirjaz 2y ago
  60% of the market place catalog, not actually usage. That is at about 50/50. Microsoft needs to work on getting it the other way. More like 60% Windows Server and 40% Linux Server
  - klaas- 2y ago
    they do talk about actual usage in the talk, but only vcpu wise, not instance wise. For vcpus it's also more than 60% linux
ein0p 2y ago
AFAIK that has been the case for many years, to the point where in Azure it’s acceptable to go “Linux-first” when developing new services. Maybe even “Linux-only”.
- whalesalad 2y ago
  I cannot comprehend the folks who choose to build and deploy apps on Windows servers. C# and F# I can get behind, but I would deploy them on Linux.
  - ein0p 2y ago
    Same, but moreover, I consider the “windows” part of my dev experience to be entirely worthless and advise my son to not bother with anything Windows specific. Our lives are finite, might as well learn stuff that is Free and that has lasting value.
knowitnone 2y ago
[flagged]
- jaboutboul 2y ago
  Can you elaborate on this? It's rather general.
colonwqbang 2y ago
> Microsoft enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Is this a paid ad we are reading, or a news article? Genuinely confused.
- whalesalad 2y ago
  > Microsoft, Oracle and Red Hat are sponsors of The New Stack.

122 points by jaboutboul 2y ago

wslh 2y ago

Isn't that obvious? It doesn't matter if Microsoft is Microsoft, Azure is a cloud service and in the cloud Linux (server(s)) is/are the winner(s). The only thing that could compete with that are virtual/remote Windows desktops but I really cannot think that they are used in all industries like Linux servers.

commercialnix 2y ago

Windows is a pile of shit and only managed to stick around by bundling an actual Linux kernel in WSL2 to cling to relevance with software developers and ultimately because retards who want to play-pretend they are IT and shouldn't be anywhere near computers beyond muh video games keep installing it everywhere.

surfingdino 2y ago

That must annoy Mr Cutler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler

lostmsu 2y ago
According to that wiki he does not work on Azure since 2012
- surfingdino 2y ago
  According to the same page, he is not a fan of Unix. I assume he is not a fan of Linux by extension.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

sirjaz 2y ago

This article doesn't talk about actual VMs/instances running in Azure. Also, so many new service devs only target Linux, and Windows is an after thought. No wonder 60% of the market place is linux.

klaas- 2y ago
the actual talk (video in article) says more than 60% of VM vcpus are from linux VMs, it does not talk about instances though. But I would expect Linux to be a lot of very small and very large VMs :)

loughnane 2y ago

When OS became a product input rather than the product itself, things changed

jaboutboul 2y ago

Hey everyone. We put in lots of efforts to make sure that Linux runs really well on Azure and that you have a great experience. Glad this got some traction and glad to answer any questions.

seniorThrowaway 2y ago
My experience was that the Linux VM agents used to cause frequent problems but in the time I was using Azure I did see great improvements in them, kudos for that. I'd like to see less churn and breaking changes in agents and in Azure in general, but that seems to be a problem common to all major clouds.
benterix 2y ago
> Glad this got some traction Yes, we know.[0] [0] https://www.kickscondor.com/satya-nadella-'reads''games'-hacker-news/ https://www.kickscondor.com/satya-nadella-'reads''games'-hac...
- HDThoreaun 2y ago
  I really fail to see how interacting with the community to see how we feel could possibly be negative. Sure theyre doing it to push their product, but theyre also doing it to see where they need to improve.
  - benterix 2y ago
    I don't see it as particularly positive or negative, just something worth knowing.
- jaboutboul 2y ago
  Thanks for posting that. This post had nothing to do with Satya nor did he or anyone aside from myself and a couple other team mates see it before posting.
benreesman 2y ago
Congratulations on the milestone! Is there a paved path for bringing up NixOS on Azure VMs? I haven’t looked hard yet, but I’m about to so if this is a known thing I’d be grateful for any pointers.

jmclnx 2y ago

Honest Question, is Azure itself a Linux System. Or are these Linuxes running on top of some version of Windows ?

klaas- 2y ago
so the "real" azure nodes are some kind of special Windows+HyperV but for example their accelerator cards are linuxes: https://cfp.all-systems-go.io/media/all-systems-go-2023/submissions/7URRNC/resources/ASG_2023_Microsoft_Azure_Boost_i8m559R.pdf https://cfp.all-systems-go.io/media/all-systems-go-2023/subm...
daxfohl 2y ago
I was there three years ago. Most (possibly all) of what was running on bare metal was Windows/Hyper-V. Some Azure service backends ran on Linux VMs; AKS backend for instance was on Linux I believe. Most were Windows/C# though. I know there was some initiative to allow for Linux bare metal for some internal services, I think to allow for running k8s clusters without the extra hypervisor layer(?), but it was still WIP when I left.
jaboutboul 2y ago
The Azure infrastructure, as I assume most hyperscale infrastructures are, is hybrid depending on the service. Service owners typically have a fair amount of liberty in deciding how they architect their service and what they use underneath it.
delfinom 2y ago
Microsoft uses a Windows derived host OS running Hyper-V for the VMs. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-os-platform-blog/azure-host-os-cloud-host/ba-p/3709528?WT.mc_id=modinfra-0000-thmaure https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-os-platform-b...
- lyu07282 2y ago
  They always liked to dogfeed their own stuff even when it makes no sense whatsoever

tonymet 2y ago

IMO this is more of a distribution problem than an OS problem. If MS did a better job at supporting headless Windows distros to compete with Debian (and similar linux) distros, it would be more popular. For 9/ 10 tasks, it's way easier to spin up Debian , install a web / db / app server and have a running solution. With windows you're still running through dozens of MSI packages, setup screens. It's too inconsistent. There are workarounds to this, but they are not as mature & familiar as the corresponding linux setup. It's the UX not the platform.

what-the-grump 2y ago
Why is it a problem at all or is being frame like a problem? Microsoft can easily drop a fork of windows, slam out all of the com crap, leave .net core and include some IIS, but why, you already have someone doing it in Linux.
- everforward 2y ago
  It makes Windows hard to operate in a “servers are cattle, not pets” environment, though my experience is limited so I’m open to corrections. That then makes Windows less appealing to the infra-as-code crowd, which is growing to be “almost everyone” these days. It’s not just having an image with those things, it’s the entire surrounding ecosystem. Eg my experience with exe or msi installers is that using them without a GUI ranges from “difficult to find the right CLI switches” to “just not gonna happen”. Also, I think a lot of that com crap is used by Powershell, so gutting it also means giving up CLI access to stuff.
  - atomicnumber3 2y ago
    "my experience with exe or msi installers is that using them without a GUI ranges from “difficult to find the right CLI switches” to “just not gonna happen”." This was my student job during college :) wrapping installers in scripts so they'd install headlessly. My favorite part was that windows would need to be rebooted CONSTANTLY. Seriously. Provisioning a new box for some environments would result in TEN OR MORE reboots depending on exactly what shitware you had picked to install. And by shitware I do of course mean exorbiently-expensively-licensed academic/scientific software. The more scientific it was, somehow the exponentially worse the installer experience would be. We had one package where we were literally forced to cram in a step where you would literally pick up the phone and call IT and someone would come over and plug a USB in while the install proceeded. The software was able to be network-licensed but only post-install, the installer itself never got the memo and wanted the usb to be physically present on the box during install. Death by a thousand cuts (and some big gashes), Windows is just not built to work headlessly/scriptably, period. And trying to make it work like that takes tremendous investment, constant babysitting, and it's still fairly shitty even in the end. Meanwhile we just apt install shit in dockerfiles and it just works.

clarkevans 2y ago

Thank you @jaboutboul. I appreciate that Linux works so well on Azure. A substantial problem for the Linux ecosystem on Azure is that Azure Files is not POSIX compliant. With Container Apps, ephemeral storage is POSIX compliant. However, if you mount a persistent Azure Files file system and use it directly, some applications break. One workaround is to use rsync in the background to replicate data from ephemeral to Azure Files, but we can lose data this way (and ephemeral storage is limited to 8 GiB). It'd also be nice if "Consumption Only" container apps would have more than 4GB of memory. It's so nice to use these.

klaas- 2y ago
you can use azure files nfs, that should be posix compliant, but it comes without auth or encryption ... :)
- phatfish 2y ago
  The NFS protocol does not support all the functions of a "native" filesystem running on a block device. NFS is fine for configuration files or read only. But workloads that do any sort of intensive writes will probably not like NFS, from SQLite up. The newest NFS versions might fix some of the issues around caching that cause problems for write operations though.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- clarkevans 2y ago
  NFS requires a custom VNet. Using a fully managed environment is important to us.
jaboutboul 2y ago
I've forwarded this feedback to both teams. Can you email or message me so that I can loop you into the product teams?

jdoliner 2y ago

It's the year of Linux on someone else's Desktop.

odo1242 2y ago
*server
- quaintdev 2y ago
  That has been true for decades?

jeffrallen 2y ago

...or at least the top one that's, you know, not in a BSOD crash loop.

jaboutboul 2y ago
LOL

tracker1 2y ago

I'm honestly surprised it's not much higher than "over 60%". I know that a lot of orgs have done lift+shift for Windows services on Azure... Considering many, many things developed for .Net are trivial to update/port to newer versions on Linux/Docker, I'm just surprised more haven't done so.

sirjaz 2y ago
60% of the market place catalog, not actually usage. That is at about 50/50. Microsoft needs to work on getting it the other way. More like 60% Windows Server and 40% Linux Server
- klaas- 2y ago
  they do talk about actual usage in the talk, but only vcpu wise, not instance wise. For vcpus it's also more than 60% linux

ein0p 2y ago

AFAIK that has been the case for many years, to the point where in Azure it’s acceptable to go “Linux-first” when developing new services. Maybe even “Linux-only”.

whalesalad 2y ago
I cannot comprehend the folks who choose to build and deploy apps on Windows servers. C# and F# I can get behind, but I would deploy them on Linux.
- ein0p 2y ago
  Same, but moreover, I consider the “windows” part of my dev experience to be entirely worthless and advise my son to not bother with anything Windows specific. Our lives are finite, might as well learn stuff that is Free and that has lasting value.

knowitnone 2y ago

[flagged]

jaboutboul 2y ago
Can you elaborate on this? It's rather general.

colonwqbang 2y ago

> Microsoft enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Is this a paid ad we are reading, or a news article? Genuinely confused.

whalesalad 2y ago
> Microsoft, Oracle and Red Hat are sponsors of The New Stack.