

Linux rules the Clouds - Garbage
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/linux-rules-the-clouds/7982

======
ghshephard
RHEL (and SUSE, to some degree) is popular with two crowds - Enterprise
Software Vendors who need to have a platform that they claim is "Supported",
and anyone trying to run that software. Particularly Oracle and the like.
These people typically spend money like it's water, so they're great customers
and make Redhat lots of money.

Centos used to be wildly popular as the "Free" substitute for RHEL, but, back
around 2009 or so, where Ubuntu actually started to get a reputation for (A)
reliable releases (B) rock solid apt-gt support, (C) a whiff of an
"Enterprise" backing it (D) Canonical Support, and (E) lots of AMIs floating
around (I see 22 for RHEL, 1053 for Ubuntu) - it picked up inertia on AWS.
Particular for the crowd that is keen on the .deb linux derivatives.

It sort of feeds on itself - Ubuntu is popular as an EC2 platform, means
people become familiar with it, means it becomes more popular.

~~~
endtime
You're also just about forced to use RHEL if you're a customer of Rackspace's
managed hosting. My life would have been quite a bit simpler on Ubuntu with
Postrgres - RHEL and MySQL have led to at least one problem each - but
Rackspace only supports MySQL on RHEL. Or at least, that was the case 15
months ago when I signed up with them.

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corin_
"I would have guessed the leading operating system on the top cloud platform
would have been Red Hat and its close relatives, CentOS, Oracle Enterprise
Linux, and Fedora."

So all the surprise he is expressing has nothing to do with Linux ruling the
clouds, just which distro of Linux, so why did he pick that title?

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chanks
"Today, December 20th, Ubuntu is running 4,840 instances on EC2, followed by
CentOS, with 1,250, Fedora with 313; Oracle with 80; and Red Hat with a mere
73 instances."

Only ~6500 instances up and running on EC2 today? That seems to me to be too
low by at least a couple orders of magnitude.

Edit: Their cited source (<http://thecloudmarket.com/stats>) is a catalog of
images, which makes a lot more sense.

~~~
moe
_Only ~6500 instances up and running on EC2 today? That seems to me to be too
low by at least a couple orders of magnitude._

Yes, it's utter nonsense. The EC2 instance-count is in the millions, not
thousands. The author just doesn't know the difference between instance and
image.

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guelo
I guess the popularity of Ubuntu on the cloud has to do with their success on
the desktop.

~~~
zitterbewegung
Also, they seem to support the cloud pretty well coming out with ec2 versions
and they integrated system tools for creating virtual machines.

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sagarun
Since when amazon started publishing this information?

~~~
JonnieCache
It doesn't. The author is simply wholly ignorant of any and all facts. This is
ZDnet after all. He also attempts to directly compare Azure to Ubuntu, which
is simply a basic category error.

Dear CBS, owner of ZDnet: I can churn out ill-informed garbage too, probably
at a higher WPM than this guy, and I am willing to work for 75% of whatever
you're paying him. I can be contacted via the URL in my profile. Thanks.

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te_chris
This will have a number of factors, but some key ones for me:

Brand recognition. Ubunutu is big, when I needed a linux VM distro guess what
I chose? When I bought a linode, guess what I chose?

Popularity of the cloud/servers. More people are running servers these days
for various things. EC2 and cheap VPS are making a lot more people interested
in a free, powerful and stable OS that will run their server with minimum
hassle and maximum ability to find articles on google.

Ease. Ubuntu has great docs, lots of easy to understand tutorials and easy
package management.

There are others, but this is it for me. Ubunutu is so much win.

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moe
How, on earth, did this get 20 upvotes?

As others have pointed out the author clearly doesn't have a _remote clue_
what he is talking about.

When you don't know the difference between an EC2 instance and an EC2 image
then please refrain from writing articles about cloud providers...

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apedley
Good to see I wasn't the only person who thought the author was crazy when
reading that article.

