4 ms·

Agreed with a lot of the article up until: "AZURE IS GOING TO WIN". This is likely the result of spending too much time inside a Microsoft cocoon and has no id

by mythz 14y ago

Agreed with a lot of the article up until: "AZURE IS GOING TO WIN". This is likely the result of spending too much time inside a Microsoft cocoon and has no idea that most of the outside world isn't built on Azure, or even windows servers. The only thing Azure is going to win at is being the default/preferred cloud provider for Microsoft MVPs and other VS.NET devs primarily based on a Microsoft tech stack.

meaty 14y ago
Perhaps us .Net devs are the silent majority? Windows pays the bills for a lot of people. One of our clients has 17,000 windows desktops, 3,500 windows laptops, 500 windows servers and a team of 80 people looking after it all. None of this is connected to the internet or is tongue-wagged about profusely. There are thousands of companies that size hiding that no one hears about here be use they are not clever, vc funded or bleeding edge. The world is built on lots of things, but a chunk of it certainly is built on windows, possibly more than you can see with the naked eye.
- mythz 14y ago
  No not silent majority, not even close. Naming a single instance is not representative of the real-world at all. Unfortunately Amazon/Azure are coy with their numbers but I expect there is likely an order of magnitude more instances deployed on Amazon than Azure. Some rough numbers to provide some meaningful context of Microsoft's overall server market share: Microsoft only has 11.62% of the total web server market share of active sites, 12.86% activity from the top 100M busiest sites: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/03/01/march-2013-web-server-survey.html http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/03/01/march-2013-web-... Only a fraction of the top internet sites are deployed on a Microsoft platform: http://www.seomoz.org/top500 http://www.seomoz.org/top500 C# (the most popular .NET language) is the 12th most popular language on GitHub: https://github.com/languages/C%23 https://github.com/languages/C%23
  - gjulianm 14y ago
    That's not a meaningful context. That web server market share doesn't include all the on-premises servers for Intranets, mail, shared folders... Neither the Github percentage is representative. In fact, when your parent was referring to with 'silent majority' is that those C# projects are not on GitHub, not open source, just internal tools. I don't say that .NET is a majority, or minority, or whatever. I sincerely don't have the data. But those numbers you gave don't prove anything.
  - meaty 14y ago
    That's web sites. That's a fraction of the real world, which is my point. Most businesses don't run over HTTP. If most of the top 500 web sites disappeared, the world wouldn't stop. GitHub is not a good measure of popularity of a proprietary language mainly aimed at internal and closed source software. In fact, if you added our 4.2mloc of total c# code to githib I reckon the stats would be different.
    - mythz 14y ago
      HTTP-based services and websites is going to be the majority of what services that are going to be hosted on Amazon/Azure. Yes, many enterprises also makes use of MQ's and NoSQL, which due to their weak offerings and poor positioning is relatively non-existent on Microsoft platforms.
      - meaty 14y ago
        I think you are smoking crack. Our AD is on azure. Its not designed for http specifically. The azure web instances bit is but the whole platform is IaaS style. So hadoop with SQL server (even ESENT if you want a key-value store) and MSMQ/BizTalk are not used? Only the entire health service in the UK runs on their 'poor offerings'... Deep sigh. I think there are two views of reality.
        mythz 14y ago
        If we're going to start sharing personal opinions, I think you're naive, insulated inside a Microsoft bubble and unable to comprehend the written word. I said "majority" of services going on the cloud will be HTTP-based services - feel free to provide any evidence that contradicts this (and no, "But we host our AD on Azure!" doesn't count). That's also where the most of their Azure marketing efforts are going (which has historically had a strong impact in how .NET devs behave) I said "relatively non-existent", not that they're not used at all. i.e. MQ's are sparingly used in .NET than say compared to the JVM platform which has a metric ton more quality MQ solutions than what's offered from Microsoft. Also NoSQL is effectively thriving on most other platforms which benefit from active communities and solid language bindings, in contrast, most of .NET still uses SQL Server for most things.
dm8 14y ago
Outside bay area and startups world, windows servers are gold standard. Particularly, large enterprises. They have created nice lock-ins too. Majority of large enterprises (not just in US but around world) have Windows stack meaning majority of tech team consists of .net folks with all the .net tools like visual studio, MSDN licenses etc. And with Azure, you add cloud computing too. So it's likely that all these big enterprises are going to use Azure with their fat checquebooks. P.S. I haven't used Azure platform yet so I can't comment on product quality of Azure
- Nursie 14y ago
  "Outside bay area and startups world, windows servers are gold standard." Not so sure this is true. Unless you mean to include the whole software industry in 'startups world', but the likes of IBM are not really startups or bay based. You might also like to think about whether 'gold standard' or 'default' is more accurate.
  - lambda 14y ago
    In the general purpose business IT world. Just about every small to medium business that isn't heavily tech focused is built around Microsoft software. There is a ton of business IT that is entirely based around the Microsoft platform, and they are making good inroads there with their cloud services. Why run your own Sharepoint? Why buy everyone a desktop license for Office, when you can run it in the cloud and easily sync?
    - Nursie 14y ago
      "In the general purpose business IT world. Just about every small to medium business..." Which is not the same as "outside the bay area and startups world", which is all I was saying.
meaty 14y ago
Azure is quite scary good but the main problem is that people really don't understand what it is. If they actually work through that, I fully believe it will win. We have a couple of Linux instances on azure to give you an idea how odd it is.
- mythz 14y ago
  It's quite scary expensive. I got a better spec'ed server on Hetzner for 1/11th the cost of an Azure instance: http://www.slideshare.net/fullscreen/newmovie/what-istheservicestack-14819151/49 http://www.slideshare.net/fullscreen/newmovie/what-istheserv...
  - meaty 14y ago
    Yep it is expensive, bit hetzner are unreliable, their kit performs poorly, their support sucks and you can't deploy a sql server instance quickly (the latter is quite useful if you use sql server).
    - mythz 14y ago
      Hetzner has never failed me, it processes 3k+ C# redis commands in <1s which was 8x faster than my previous old Linux server of Leaseweb (costing 4x more). Although my old Linux server did quite well with over 480 days uptime and processed more than 10M commands. http://www.servicestack.net/mythz_blog/?p=838 http://www.servicestack.net/mythz_blog/?p=838 In cloud-speak, that's more than 99.99999% uptime. The current Hetzner server is looking good over 176 days uptime having processed more than 9.7M+ commands: http://www.servicestack.net/RedisAdminUI/AjaxClient/ http://www.servicestack.net/RedisAdminUI/AjaxClient/ There have multiple Azure outages within the same time-frame my Linux servers have been happily chugging along. It's trivial to setup PostgreSQL/MySql on Linux. I personally don't deploy my own stuff on expensive SqlServer instances.
      - meaty 14y ago
        Uptime is not a problem. Stuff breaks. Being able to contact someone, get a root cause of an issue and get help to mitigate it is what is important. In our case, a trial with Hetzner found their support to be somewhat lacking if something went wrong. The azure outages didn't affect us at all. Out load characteristics are somewhat higher than that. We can shift 10 million http hits an hour quite happily.
qntmfred 14y ago
Azure is going to win was the only thing I agreed with.

by mythz 14y ago

meaty 14y ago

Perhaps us .Net devs are the silent majority? Windows pays the bills for a lot of people. One of our clients has 17,000 windows desktops, 3,500 windows laptops, 500 windows servers and a team of 80 people looking after it all. None of this is connected to the internet or is tongue-wagged about profusely. There are thousands of companies that size hiding that no one hears about here be use they are not clever, vc funded or bleeding edge. The world is built on lots of things, but a chunk of it certainly is built on windows, possibly more than you can see with the naked eye.

mythz 14y ago
No not silent majority, not even close. Naming a single instance is not representative of the real-world at all. Unfortunately Amazon/Azure are coy with their numbers but I expect there is likely an order of magnitude more instances deployed on Amazon than Azure. Some rough numbers to provide some meaningful context of Microsoft's overall server market share: Microsoft only has 11.62% of the total web server market share of active sites, 12.86% activity from the top 100M busiest sites: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/03/01/march-2013-web-server-survey.html http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/03/01/march-2013-web-... Only a fraction of the top internet sites are deployed on a Microsoft platform: http://www.seomoz.org/top500 http://www.seomoz.org/top500 C# (the most popular .NET language) is the 12th most popular language on GitHub: https://github.com/languages/C%23 https://github.com/languages/C%23
- gjulianm 14y ago
  That's not a meaningful context. That web server market share doesn't include all the on-premises servers for Intranets, mail, shared folders... Neither the Github percentage is representative. In fact, when your parent was referring to with 'silent majority' is that those C# projects are not on GitHub, not open source, just internal tools. I don't say that .NET is a majority, or minority, or whatever. I sincerely don't have the data. But those numbers you gave don't prove anything.
- meaty 14y ago
  That's web sites. That's a fraction of the real world, which is my point. Most businesses don't run over HTTP. If most of the top 500 web sites disappeared, the world wouldn't stop. GitHub is not a good measure of popularity of a proprietary language mainly aimed at internal and closed source software. In fact, if you added our 4.2mloc of total c# code to githib I reckon the stats would be different.
  - mythz 14y ago
    HTTP-based services and websites is going to be the majority of what services that are going to be hosted on Amazon/Azure. Yes, many enterprises also makes use of MQ's and NoSQL, which due to their weak offerings and poor positioning is relatively non-existent on Microsoft platforms.
    - meaty 14y ago
      I think you are smoking crack. Our AD is on azure. Its not designed for http specifically. The azure web instances bit is but the whole platform is IaaS style. So hadoop with SQL server (even ESENT if you want a key-value store) and MSMQ/BizTalk are not used? Only the entire health service in the UK runs on their 'poor offerings'... Deep sigh. I think there are two views of reality.
      - mythz 14y ago
        If we're going to start sharing personal opinions, I think you're naive, insulated inside a Microsoft bubble and unable to comprehend the written word. I said "majority" of services going on the cloud will be HTTP-based services - feel free to provide any evidence that contradicts this (and no, "But we host our AD on Azure!" doesn't count). That's also where the most of their Azure marketing efforts are going (which has historically had a strong impact in how .NET devs behave) I said "relatively non-existent", not that they're not used at all. i.e. MQ's are sparingly used in .NET than say compared to the JVM platform which has a metric ton more quality MQ solutions than what's offered from Microsoft. Also NoSQL is effectively thriving on most other platforms which benefit from active communities and solid language bindings, in contrast, most of .NET still uses SQL Server for most things.

dm8 14y ago

Outside bay area and startups world, windows servers are gold standard. Particularly, large enterprises. They have created nice lock-ins too. Majority of large enterprises (not just in US but around world) have Windows stack meaning majority of tech team consists of .net folks with all the .net tools like visual studio, MSDN licenses etc. And with Azure, you add cloud computing too. So it's likely that all these big enterprises are going to use Azure with their fat checquebooks. P.S. I haven't used Azure platform yet so I can't comment on product quality of Azure

Nursie 14y ago
"Outside bay area and startups world, windows servers are gold standard." Not so sure this is true. Unless you mean to include the whole software industry in 'startups world', but the likes of IBM are not really startups or bay based. You might also like to think about whether 'gold standard' or 'default' is more accurate.
- lambda 14y ago
  In the general purpose business IT world. Just about every small to medium business that isn't heavily tech focused is built around Microsoft software. There is a ton of business IT that is entirely based around the Microsoft platform, and they are making good inroads there with their cloud services. Why run your own Sharepoint? Why buy everyone a desktop license for Office, when you can run it in the cloud and easily sync?
  - Nursie 14y ago
    "In the general purpose business IT world. Just about every small to medium business..." Which is not the same as "outside the bay area and startups world", which is all I was saying.

meaty 14y ago

Azure is quite scary good but the main problem is that people really don't understand what it is. If they actually work through that, I fully believe it will win. We have a couple of Linux instances on azure to give you an idea how odd it is.

mythz 14y ago
It's quite scary expensive. I got a better spec'ed server on Hetzner for 1/11th the cost of an Azure instance: http://www.slideshare.net/fullscreen/newmovie/what-istheservicestack-14819151/49 http://www.slideshare.net/fullscreen/newmovie/what-istheserv...
- meaty 14y ago
  Yep it is expensive, bit hetzner are unreliable, their kit performs poorly, their support sucks and you can't deploy a sql server instance quickly (the latter is quite useful if you use sql server).
  - mythz 14y ago
    Hetzner has never failed me, it processes 3k+ C# redis commands in <1s which was 8x faster than my previous old Linux server of Leaseweb (costing 4x more). Although my old Linux server did quite well with over 480 days uptime and processed more than 10M commands. http://www.servicestack.net/mythz_blog/?p=838 http://www.servicestack.net/mythz_blog/?p=838 In cloud-speak, that's more than 99.99999% uptime. The current Hetzner server is looking good over 176 days uptime having processed more than 9.7M+ commands: http://www.servicestack.net/RedisAdminUI/AjaxClient/ http://www.servicestack.net/RedisAdminUI/AjaxClient/ There have multiple Azure outages within the same time-frame my Linux servers have been happily chugging along. It's trivial to setup PostgreSQL/MySql on Linux. I personally don't deploy my own stuff on expensive SqlServer instances.
    - meaty 14y ago
      Uptime is not a problem. Stuff breaks. Being able to contact someone, get a root cause of an issue and get help to mitigate it is what is important. In our case, a trial with Hetzner found their support to be somewhat lacking if something went wrong. The azure outages didn't affect us at all. Out load characteristics are somewhat higher than that. We can shift 10 million http hits an hour quite happily.

qntmfred 14y ago

Azure is going to win was the only thing I agreed with.