
Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores - crpietschmann
https://build5nines.com/linux-is-most-used-os-in-microsoft-azure-over-50-percent-fo-vm-cores/
======
jamieweb
I'm interested to know what the majority of the Windows machines are used for.

I can't think it'd be anything other than 'big enterprise' applications, where
there seems to be a lot of bespoke stuff built specifically for Windows Server
(e.g. finance software, healthcare systems, marriage registration, taxi
licensing, nursing home management, etc).

Unfortunately this sort of stuff is fairly rare to be available in the open-
source world, because there is such little demand for it by individuals.

The wackiest one I've come across is a CMS (Crematorium Management System). If
anyone wants to create an open-source one with me, please get in touch...!

~~~
dmw_ng
You don't see it on HN much but the Windows world is still massive, and there
are still plenty of ASP.NET folk around. I'd suppose you only have to take
half a footstep outside the "pure Internet services" sphere to start bumping
into lots of Windows, in pretty much any direction you happen to step.

There are also whole industries where Windows has a particularly strong
influence, e.g. (from experience) some parts of finance, petroleum,
television, and I imagine things like render farms or other specialist
graphics work that might have grown out of a once Windows-only desktop
software cottage industry.

I guess it's also important to say, much as you might find a zealous love for
UNIX inside many (computer) engineering-led organizations, similar loyalty to
Windows exists in many more (locally under-represented) industries for reasons
that are less likely to be understood around here.

~~~
StillBored
I think its a SMB thing. Basically windows owns organizations with less than
10-30 people. And there are a _LOT_ of those, and they do a _LOT_ of custom
development for their little specialization. Its the excel sheets that grow
into full blown applications, or the vm.net one off utilities someone hacked
together that grow into the backbone of a thriving small business. Even the
generic catagory SMBs (dentists, car repair, etc) end up mostly being windows
shops because the owner gets quickbooks or whatever and runs the whole thing
from a windows pc in the office.

~~~
HeadsUpHigh
No way around using windows as a private medical practice. Too much bespoke
software.

~~~
genocidicbunny
Yep. I don't think I've ever seen a computer at any of the healthcare services
I've used that wasn't either ancient and running some really old bespoke
software, or wasn't some flavour of Windows running slightly less old bespoke
software.

------
tombert
This is hardly surprising.

Not to crap on MS, but I do think Linux has traditionally just been a better
operating system for servers, probably due to the fact that that's where most
of the funding for Linux ends up going, with the desktop versions of Linux
being sort of secondary.

It doesn't help that a lot of serverey software is kind of designed with
POSIX-ey stuff in mind. Node.js took awhile to get Windows support and
ZeroMQ's Windows support doesn't support IPC sockets. Hell, in the little bit
of testing that I've done with this, .NET Core is _faster_ on Linux than
Windows.

This isn't to say Windows is "bad". I'm personally not a fan but plenty of
smart people I know like Windows better than Linux. It's just to say that, for
the domain that Azure fills, Linux is often a better fit, and if MS wants to
compete with AWS, it would be borderline-idiotic not to support Linux.

~~~
rhacker
I've always got the feeling that MS specific developers are highly visual
studio oriented. They have their connection string built into the IDE. In
fact, if you asked them to make something that builds from the command line,
and runs, they would probably be scratching their head for a while.

It wouldn't surprise me at all to find some windows based companies that have
classic windows VMs in the cloud, running Visual Studio, and production
deployments are: RDP in, stopping with the little red button, updating the
codebase (with a copy over a network share), and then re-running the code on
the production server with the little green play button. Database changes are
done by hand in SQL Server Manager.

I know this isn't at all related to the post here - but it's just an
interesting phenomenon - the fact that Azure is about 50 percent windows means
it's mostly running things like Office backend products, crazy running copies
of Visual Studio. It is probably a total mess if half of Azure goes down for 5
minutes. Linux servers would come back up and continue running whatever. All
the Windows companies get a call, have to RDP in and do shit.

~~~
NicoJuicy
I'm one "visual studio Dev"

I have also build in Go, nodejs, Php, RoR.

But VS is truelly the best IDE experience I have witnessed.

Database changes are automatically migrated and deployed using entity
framework fyi.

The big deployment button changes the connection string per deployment,
deploys with feature flags directly and automatically migrates the db to the
latest version

~~~
addicted44
It's kind of funny to see the disdain for VS based deployment here, while all
the current rage right now is declarative deployment systems.

Something VS based development, build and deployment based workflows have been
doing for over a decade through the largely Web. _.config files and_.csproj
files.

~~~
NicoJuicy
Indeed, it's really powerfull.

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/host-and-
deploy...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/host-and-
deploy/iis/transform-webconfig?view=aspnetcore-3.1)

------
hi41
I bought books such as Linux Programming Interface to learn linux so that I
can apply for jobs. Later I discovered that when the companies say Linux, they
don't mean writing native applications on Linux, but that they are actually
talking about java applications on app servers such as JBoss. Does anyone
write native applications like thick client native applications on Windows
which is also rare these days.

~~~
whytaka
I am very interested in the book you mention, simply out of passion. How do
you find it?

~~~
starik36
Assuming this... [https://www.amazon.com/Linux-Programming-Interface-System-
Ha...](https://www.amazon.com/Linux-Programming-Interface-System-
Handbook/dp/1593272200)

~~~
whytaka
I see my question was rather daft.

~~~
hi41
no, it wasn't. i have responded to your previous question.

------
whoisjuan
I found it funny when in Azure you create a resource and you can pick between
Windows and Linux for the host and Windows is the default option... like bro,
I’m not gonna run my shit on Windows walled and heavily licensed garden. What
if tomorrow I have to migrate my stuff somewhere else. Are you crazy?

P.S: I know there are legitimate reasons for running something on Windows but
for any generic project that shouldn’t be the default at all. Linux is the de
facto cloud OS.

~~~
freefriedrice
I've been working with Linux and BSD for so long, I don't even know of any
Microsoft-only cloud applications. I'm completely *nix bubbled. I cannot
imagine cloud programming on windows, probably because I only write user-space
native apps. Is there a Puppet or Ansible for windows? I'd be completely lost.

~~~
vel0city
Yes, there are things like Puppet and Ansible for Windows. Two good examples
are Puppet and Ansible.

[https://puppet.com/use-cases/windows-infrastructure-
automati...](https://puppet.com/use-cases/windows-infrastructure-automation/)

[https://www.ansible.com/integrations/infrastructure/windows](https://www.ansible.com/integrations/infrastructure/windows)

There's also Desired State Configuration

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/powershell/scripting/dsc/ov...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/powershell/scripting/dsc/overview/overview?view=powershell-7)

There's also Group Policy.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_Policy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_Policy)

There's probably a thousand different ways to automatically deploy and manage
Windows servers. Its been a thing since at least NT.

------
rbanffy
50%?! That's surprisingly low.

~~~
outside1234
It is more that the percentage of workloads that are running Windows that are
hosted on Azure (vs. GCP or Amazon) is very high.

~~~
angry_octet
I would like to know what percentage of those core hours are servers (Windows
Svr, Nano vs Unix) vs desktops (Azure virtual desktop). I know there has been
a huge scale up in cloud desktops in the last few months.

------
ogre_codes
Is this surprising to anyone? Microsoft has been competing head-to-head with
AWS as a VM/ cloud provider for quite a while now and Linux is by far the
largest platform people deploy to.

I know there is some demand for Windows VMs in the enterprise, but even that
seems to be shrinking.

------
punnerud
I think Microsoft figured one thing out; you can’t fire a man who get things
done especially if there is little documentation. And you can’t avoid writing
things down if you can’t remember it. And you can’t remember it if it isn’t
visual.

I am way more productive on Linux, but I can see that this also put you in a
position to easily be replaced.

------
Mr_Sweater
This might be short sighted of me, I dont have a ton of cloud experience but I
imagine its as obvious as Linux scales orders of magnitude better than
Windows, the projects that need massive scale go cloud. Conversely sql server
can demand massive scaling, I wonder what percent of Win Server are for sql
server workloads.

------
babarock
Between this and their Azure Sphere product, Microsoft may very well be the
largest Linux vendor today.

As someone who discovered Unix in the early 00s, this makes me chuckle. What a
world!

~~~
close04
Between Azure and WSL Microsoft might be shipping more Linux kernels than any
other company out there.

~~~
partiallypro
There are so many crappy IoT devices running unpatched Linux, that I doubt it.
That is why Azure Sphere was invented, actually...but still there are so many
gadgets out there running unmaintained Linux that it's insane.

~~~
close04
Most likely but I was thinking of shipments made by a single company.

------
terrywang
Worked on XenServer for Citrix (XenSource) for a couple of years (fun ride), I
was told / also discovered that most XenServer pools were used to run Windows
infra to support XenDesktop / ICA based remote access;-)

Now Linux has won over 50% of server market share in MicroSoft Azure, where I
believe Hyper-V running on Windows is the hypervisor (Hyper-V is closely
related to Xen).

\- Linux has won (in the cloud).

\- No one has ever thought one can use Linux desktop on windows via WSL one
day.

\- The best tool (distro, etc.)is the one that does what you need at the best
cost ;-)

As a long term Linux desktop user (since Fedora Core 1 Yarrow), MicroSoft used
to be the public enemy of open source, used to disgust me, now (after vs code,
WSL, GitHub, showed genuine love to Linux and the community, etc.) I turn
neutral (AFAIR - unless that was a daydream, Linus said similar thing).

~~~
amaccuish
I really wish Citrix would still do a home-oriented XenApp/XenDesktop. I still
find ICA weirdly better than RDP, it's so much smoother.

~~~
terrywang
I think VDI is still Citrix's core competency. They merged XenApp with
XenDesktop and later on turned into something called Citrix Workspace, I
haven't been following Citrix products other than XenServer (my only interest
joining back then).

It's not cheap to run and maintain XenDesktop based VDI infra for remote
access. But I agree, ICA (improved RDP) and its client Receiver (works on
Linux at least used to ;-) offers unique and seamless user experience working
remotely.

------
Traster
I find it really funny that it used to be peole would point to Linux usage in
Microsoft as a "Hah! Look how crap Windows is!". In reality, this is just
reflective of the fact that Microsoft is succeeding even without Windows,
which in my opinion is quite an extraordinarily impressive manouvre. People
think seem to cheer on the death of windows as if Microsoft were the same
company as it was when people were booing Steve Jobs at the Macworld
announcement.

------
I_am_tiberius
I had to move from Digital Ocean to Azure recently because my customers didn't
know DO and thought they can't trust them. I was super happy with DO though.
Azure is the ridiculously expensive without bringing any benefit. Sure, there
are client tools but I don't need them. It seems to me every click I do on the
Azure portal makes the costs increase by a few euros. I wish Digital Ocean
would be accepted by more corporate clients.

~~~
mekster
Not just expensive but the Azure web interface is a huge maze that I cannot
even simply find out last month's cost breakdown in minutes. That was so much
like Windows messed up UI, it wasn't funny.

~~~
I_am_tiberius
Yes, fun is something else.

------
tracker1
I'm not surprised by this... I'm not sure what the actual raw numbers are, but
would be surprised if it weren't. A lot of what I've worked on the past 5+
years targeted Linux and/or Linux Docker containers. Currently restructuring
and migrating apps to .Net Core so that they can be containerized.

------
gardnr
At a startup back in 2017, we received a substantial amount of free Azure
credit through the their innovation program. At the time, there was no way to
run postgres with guaranteed iops. You had to run SQL server to get guaranteed
iops.

We ended up deploying to AWS instead.

------
VWWHFSfQ
I feel like it's inevitable that Microsoft will acquire Canonical at some
point.

~~~
int_19h
Why not RedHat? That's where the enterprise Linux server market seemingly is.

~~~
VWWHFSfQ
IBM already bought it

------
ndesaulniers
This is great; a significant portion of potential growth to Microsoft's
revenue tied to Linux is good for Linux and continued investment in Linux from
Microsoft.

------
tonyedgecombe
I'm not sure I understand why this is the case, is there some advantage Azure
has for hosting Linux that the many other providers don't have?

~~~
jandrese
I suspect Linux is the majority across all hosting services. No OS license
nonsense to worry about and easy to remotely administer with a simple ssh
connection.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I can see the benefits of Linux, I'm just wondering why host it on Azure.

~~~
koffiezet
Depends on your situation. If you're already in bed with Microsoft, the
support you get is pretty damn nice, and surprised me a lot.

A client of mine, a large multinational's overall corporate IT is very much
Microsoft oriented, but I was working together with an R&D division, setting
up a Linux/k8s-based proof of concept project. Somehow, the Azure team got
wind of this and asked if we could meet. I expected absolutely nothing, but
they ended up sending very competent technical sales guy, together with 2
engineers, that could answer every single question I threw at them, and they
offered to help designing and setting up the infrastructure part, without us
ever asking, no strings or invoices attached.

I think this sped up the poc by about a month or 2, just because they backed
my opinion pretty much all the time, and had very valuable feedback and
proposals to tackle certain other things. It also removed a lot of political
crap, which is always there in a multinational. Being able to show the
department head that Microsoft agreed with my solutions carried quite a bit of
weight, and it didn't hurt my position at all.

Now, one of the managers tried to get the same support from both AWS and
Google. AWS could send us some engineers (which would just be some freelance
AWS certified engineers), but they fully determined the schedule (first slot
we could get was 3 months after us asking), and there was a quite hefty
invoice attached. Google didn't even respond. Now I know that cloud providers
don't work that way, but many businesses don't like that. They want to be able
to call someone when shit hits the fan. MS just uses their "boots on the
ground" to also push azure within such businesses, and I'm not surprised it's
working.

But would I host stuff there myself? Doubt it. I think the top 3 cloud
providers are just too expensive.

~~~
jandrese
Which provider is best often comes down to your use case. Do you need tons of
memory? Lots of disk I/O? Network bandwidth? Huge amounts of CPU? GPU cores?
Pricing can vary a fair bit depending on the details of your workload.

------
vmchale
Makes sense. I can hardly think of anyone who doesn't use a Unix for servers.

~~~
aidenn0
But approximately 100% the people that use Windows in the cloud are going to
be using Azure.

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intellectronica
dog bites man

