
Microsoft says 40 percent of all VMs in Azure now are running Linux - ashitlerferad
http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-says-40-percent-of-all-vms-in-azure-now-are-running-linux/
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skynode
Lots of emotional comments with the usual I-hate-MS bent, without a single
reference to data showing Azure [Linux VM] users or non-users. Always shocking
to see individuals who claim to be rational and open-minded in one domain
become irrational, closed and judgemental in another.

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dec0dedab0de
Is it really irrational to distrust Microsoft? I mean, they seem to be much
more palatable lately, but does that mean we should completely forget their
history? I'm all for using the best technology for the job, but when you're in
a close call situation I think it's okay to rely on an organizations history
to make a decision.

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rrhd
Yes, when you don't apply the same logic to the other large tech companies.

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pedrocr
Is there another large tech company with the history of wrongdoing that
Microsoft has? They're a convicted monopolist that personally affected a large
subset of the developer community with repercussions that took decades to
solve (if they're solved at all).

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mmgutz
We're running our Debian farm on Azure thanks to startup perks. It's been up
100% for us the last 2.5 years. Azure service is no less or better than AWS.

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teilo
This doesn't surprise me overmuch. The foot in the door is Office 365
Enterprise, which comes with AD in Azure for free. From there, it's natural to
setup a VPN to your Azure environment. With that in place, competitive
pricing, and better compliance tools (such as host-external session-based flow
monitoring) it becomes an attractive solution.

Tie that to experience with Hyper-V. Companies like mine who have unused
Hyper-V capacity due to Microsoft's ridiculous VM licensing scheme for
Windows, tend to run Linux instances on that extra capacity. The high
performance of Linux on Hyper-V was an eye-opener for us. I could see us using
Azure for Linux.

That said, we are 99% AWS, and I don't see our online platform ever moving
from them.

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UnoriginalGuy
> Microsoft's ridiculous VM licensing scheme for Windows

Microsoft offers at least three different ways to license Windows to run on a
VM in-house. Core count, instance count, or site. Are all three "ridiculous?"

None of Microsoft's license types require a certain Hyper-V capacity. In fact
the whole "we were required to over-allocate Hyper-V so run Linux on the spare
capacity" claim makes no sense.

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a2tech
Yes, they're all ridiculous. Also their licensing model is so hideously
complex even different license advisors from Microsoft will give you different
answers as to what you need. The only way you feel comfortable being fully in
compliance with licensing is by massively overbuying. Its a ridiculous burden
to place on a business.

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ed_blackburn
Seems very low for public cloud provider.

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brianwawok
Who chooses to use Azure? Mostly MS shops. I see no compelling features for a
FOSS shop.

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johnnycarcin
As someone who works at MSFT in the Azure space I can tell you that the
statement of "Who chooses to use Azure? Mostly MS shops" is inaccurate in my
experience. Of all of the customers I've worked with, most of their
architecture is at least 50% linux/OSS, typically more like 75%. I've honestly
yet to see a customer moving to Azure who has more than 50% Windows based
systems. Almost everyone I've worked with only uses Windows Server for their
SQL Server services, outside of that it's RHEL, CentOS or Ubuntu.

With that being said, the typical appeal of Azure (and likely other cloud
providers) are the PaaS services. Those typically do have Windows VMs sitting
behind them, although we are starting to make Linux an option on most of
those.

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rsynnott
It seems likely that most people who use SQL Server were at least Microsoft
shops at some time in the past, though; otherwise why are they using SQL
Server?

Very few people start a project using SQL Server if they're not otherwise
using MS stuff.

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gaius
We'll see this change as SQL Server on Linux matures.

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brianwawok
Why?

Postgres is free and usually good enough. If you are going to pay, Oracle is
generally better. The ground that mssql wins for a non-microsoft shop is
verrrrry small.

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gaius
Most people who have paid for Oracle would be perfectly well catered for by
Postgres, it's true. Postgres gets you say the most-used 50% of Oracle for 0%
of the cost. SQL Server gets you the most-used 90% of Oracle for 25% of the
cost. The companies that need 100% of Oracle a very few and far between.
Oracle's entire business model is based on people not realizing this...

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YCode
I'd be interested to see how this breaks down as a function of cost instead of
raw numbers.

This would for example control for development environments and pet projects
as compared to production projects running on the platform.

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j_s
Yes, and account for Microsoft giving serious usage giant credits too.

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jdc0589
ehhh...maybe our definitions of serious usage are different, but even then
their EA based discount model is dumb. At our peak on azure we we're doing
about $120k/month, but didn't bother committing to more than $200k/yr because
the discounts just weren't awesome. last time I looked the discounts on more
modern VM types were WAY worse than what we used to get on older generations.
Also, once you are on EA billing all the decent billing/usage tools in the
azure portal stop working (they aren't that great anyway) and you basically
have to buy or roll your own.

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jefe_
Remove Windows servers not being used as web servers (active directory,
sharepoint, domain controllers, exchange, etc.) and the Linux number is
probably near or above 50%. This share will only grow with Microsoft embracing
Linux in .NET Core, and many of the next wave of cloud consumers being small
to mid-sized orgs looking to move to managed cloud applications vs. simply
putting their machines in the cloud.

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sheeshkebab
It’s great to have alternatives to AWS.

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lurchedsawyer
It WOULD BE great to have alternatives to AWS.

Here, fixed that for you.

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abiox
what do gcp and azure need to be considered alternatives?

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lurchedsawyer
Nothing against GCP. It's considering Azure as an alternative that I object
to.

Here's a couple of ideas:

1\. Linux support. If you look in Azure documentation they never say they
support any Linux distro - they "endorse" a couple. Amazon provides their own
for of Centos with all the conveniences like having the AWS CLI pre-installed.
Incidentally Azure is the only cloud platform where I've had machines kernel
panic randomly.

2\. A consistent interface. The Azure portal has been under development for
over 2 years now but you still need to use the "classic" interface for some
settings.

3\. Database support. Other then MS SQL Server. MySQL is supposed to be in
beta. It's been in AWS since 2009. Also Amazon is developing AuroraDB which
is, supposedly, optimised to work in AWS.

4\. Availability zones. Again in preview in Azure but have been in AWS since
2008. What's also interesting is, up until now MS marketed "Availabilty sets"
as the Azure version of AZ. One is a guarantee that a box will be spun up on a
different rack within the same datacenter, the other guarantees the box in a
separate DC.

5\. A consistent API. And I don't mean the definitions being immutable -
that's actually handled with schema versioning. I mean getting the correct
responses. Although unchanging API would be nice as well.

Here's an example: [https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bz59vPCFY-
fham1qN1E1MnZBcl...](https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bz59vPCFY-
fham1qN1E1MnZBclk) (3mb video). What basically happened was, I would deploy my
environment, run Ansible against it and get errors/unconfigured nodes. So what
happens in the video is: I run 'for i in 1 2 3; do azure vm list; done' and
get three different responses: a list of VMs, an error message saying I have
insufficient access rights to list the VMs and an empty list. All are
incorrect. The first one is the closest to the truth but it's still missing
one box. I get eventual consistency is a thing, but this was >30min after the
boxes had been provisioned.

So to answer your question as to what is needed for Azure to become a viable
alternative to AWS: I would say about 10 years.

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draw_down
They can make money off of Linux, so it’s good now.

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known
Time for MS to rollout MS-Linux

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luckydude
I have long yearned for a libmicrosoft.a that runs on top of Linux and
provides the MS ABI. Best of both worlds.

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srcmap
This is the "Return of the Jedi" Episode where the Young Jedi finally able to
bring Darth Vader back to the Light Side of the Force.

George Lucas predicted this in 1983.

