
Microsoft developer reveals Linux is now more used on Azure than Windows Server - Element_
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-developer-reveals-linux-is-now-more-used-on-azure-than-windows-server/
======
ohthehugemanate
Every few months we get another post like this, with a slightly different
measure. Yes, lots of Azure workloads run Linux, and Microsoft makes it a
priority. It's not news anymore.

At the same time, Azure itself runs largely on Windows servers in Service
Fabric ([https://github.com/Microsoft/service-
fabric](https://github.com/Microsoft/service-fabric)), so it's hard to count.
With nested hypervisors as the normal architecture nowadays, this whole tally
is pretty suspect.

But we (the tech community) never seem to get bored with the "Microsoft is
eating humble pie on OSS" story. Maybe that's exactly what Microsoft deserves
after so many years of big-bad-wolf behavior. Unfortunately it makes their
real engineering and OSS feats hard for us to see or acknowledge.

Like Service fabric. Did you know that Microsoft built and open sourced an
orchestrator that can manage tens if millions of nodes with totally diverse
workloads (containers, VMs, and bare metal), nested hypervisors, and even
nested orchestrators in a secure multi tenant context? That beats the crap out
of kubernetes on a capabilities front, but it's not an easy story to sell. Or
that Windows Hyper-V has done thin-VM/M container isolation on par with kata
and firecracker for years? Or that many (if not most) Azure services are open
source? You can run the entire azure stack on your home server closet if you
like, especially including their biggest growth areas of kubernetes and
ML/cognitive services. If you want an open source alternative to AWS, azure
can be a real option.

I enjoy the historical irony of this as much as the next guy, but we really
have to stop letting it blind us to the awesome things MS is doing that don't
fit that narrative. Microsoft is benefiting mightily by adopting open source
culture, code, and practices as fast as it can. And if we can get our heads
out of our own self-righteous asses enough to upvote the stories, we can
profit from it too.

~~~
shaklee3
Which orchestrator are you referring to? System Center in no way competes with
kubernetes since it's lacking 90% of the features. Maybe I'm bad at googling,
but I can't find what you're referring to.

Edit: I see the one you're referring to in that link, but again, it's not at
all a comparison with kubernetes. It's easy at face value to say this one is
better, but it's missing the point of kubernetes, which is extensibility,
following standards, etc.

~~~
GordonS
If you Google it you'll find several comparisons to k8s and others.

I looked into this a while back, and Service Fabric was a _clear_ winner over
k8s, and resource use was a fraction of k8s too.

But, I felt it needed to gain community traction before I could commit to
using it - knowing my luck, I'd build something and Microsoft would abandon it
because k8s...

Kind of a chicken and egg problem, which is a shame really.

~~~
shaklee3
No, it was a clear winner for your use case. It's missing a significant amount
of features from k8s, though, and if you don't need those, then great. But
don't pretend they're comparable.

I think it's more fair to say the suit different use cases (an MS person on HN
explicitly said this last year), rather than competing.

~~~
GordonS
As I remember it, it was a clear winner with no caveats. But my memory is
shit, so there is that.

What features do you believe it's missing?

~~~
shaklee3
Custom scheduler, a declarative API, the estimated of custom resources, many
different filesystems natively supported, etc

~~~
GordonS
By "scheduler", do you mean as in "decides which nodes to run on"?

You can build Service Fabric manifests with XML.

~~~
shaklee3
Yes, but from what I can tell in their documentation you cannot make the same
level of decisions that you can with kubernetes.

------
mr_toad
I see a lot of government shops picking Azure because nobody ever got fired
for buying Microsoft.

But once they open up to the cloud I see a lot of people installing stuff like
Shiney servers, Jupytr notebooks and other open source software on Linux
servers that would never have been a starter in an enterprise environment.

~~~
bhouston
The government department standardizes on Azure but all the young devs push
for Linux servers so all their shiny toys work great.

Windows is truly dead on the cloud and has been for a decade. The only thing
people use it for is self hosted exchange, and file servers and active domains
- legacy stuff.

~~~
closeparen
There is an entire parallel community of business IT, basically unknown and
unintelligible to the Silicon Valley community, where the Microsoft server-
side stack is as obvious a choice as Linux is in our world. You may even have
some of it in your company. It's really amusing (and dysfunctional) when our
projects require "Eng" and "Corp IT" to cooperate. We're both ostensibly
computer professionals who select, write, and operate production services, yet
to each side the other may as well be from Mars.

~~~
flomo
Like 10 years ago, I thought it was great when we garnered a client which was
one those "Microsoft only" type shops, because I like C#/NET. But the only
justification for using it was really "IT made us do it". And I saw how the IT
leadership in these places were older people perhaps maybe fighting older
political battles. In any case its been many years since I've stumbled across
a pure Microsoft shop. I think Azure means they know they lost, but also have
legacy business to support.

~~~
tjpnz
>But the only justification for using it was really "IT made us do it". And I
saw how the IT leadership in these places were older people perhaps maybe
fighting older political battles.

I've seen this happen too in predominantly Linux shops. In the early 2000s
Microsoft worked hard to cultivate relationships with future IT leaders and
those relationships have a way of enduring. Even if your CIO can't get
everyone onto Windows they might still find a place for Office 365 without
much time spent weighing up the alternatives.

~~~
kyriakos
IT made them do it for good reasons though. Managing a large number of users
and workstations in an enterprise environment is one of the things that
Microsoft stack stands out.

~~~
cheschire
Pull the boundaries in. Provide all of the enterprise services through the
web. Provide hardened VMs for those services that can't be migrated. Suddenly
your workstations are thin clients, and it doesn't really matter anymore if
someone decides they want BYOD.

Now you can get after the actual interesting problem of intellectual property
theft and corporate espionage. Things which the firewalls of old did nothing
to prevent but provide a layer of obfuscation.

~~~
hvidgaard
It's naive to think that just because your production critical software is web
based, you can just have everyone BYOD. That is asking for rampant malware on
the company network, and targeted attacks that steals company secrets.

~~~
y4mi
From the lens of a programmer it's definitely possible to do BYOD without any
real danger to the domain.

They need access to a few webfrontends and be able to use their SCM server...

But in order to do that, they'll have to be able to test locally or have a
really hardened access to their servers. Significantly harder than just
forcing everyone on company hardware without root/admin access

~~~
hvidgaard
Developers get special treatment, because the nature of their work often
require them to have local admin access. But the majority of people do not
need that, and if I'm in charge of company network and security, I would not
allow anything but approved machines on the internal network.

~~~
y4mi
> _Developers get special treatment, because the nature of their work often
> require them to have local admin access._

That is _extremely_ rare at larger b2b enterprises

~~~
hvidgaard
Each and every organization I've heard of that did that, reverted to give
developers local admin pretty quickly because the requests to the IT
administrators for every time a developer needed admin to install a required
dependency, start whatever at admin to debug, change reg settings, test
installations, ect.

------
oxfordmale
On Azure, a Windows VM instance tends to cost about 50% more than the
equivalent instance running Linux,so it is a no brainer to use Linux if your
application is operation system independent.

~~~
reacweb
If I encounter an issue on Linux (that I can reproduce), I can investigate it
to its root (sometimes in the kernel driver) and fix it (or find someone who
has fixed it). On windows, I have only seen issues fixed either by
reinstalling applications (mostly randomly) and praying or by using annoying
work arounds. IMHO, the cost is higher in Windows.

~~~
Someone1234
This is a roundabout way of saying: "I know more about Linux's internals than
Windows'." Essentially you're a power user of Linux and a consumer of Windows.
I'm not sure that's Windows' fault.

~~~
jandrese
Yeah, I mean why doesn't everybody dig through the kernel sources on Windows
when they encounter a bug like that?

The vast majority of Linux users will never poke around the source to the
Kernel ferreting out a bug, but they do have the option. On Windows it's much
harder to get access without being a Microsoft employee.

~~~
freeopinion
It does not end with the kernel. Of course it is possible to run proprietary
software on Linux and OSS software on Windows, but I have rarely had to deal
with proprietary software in Linux. That is only in small part because I avoid
it.

I'm not a kernel hacker. But I have on occasion cracked open the source for
some product on which I relied to find out why it was behaving contrary to my
expections. Much more I have done that with a library upon which I was
relying.

Many many times more often I have sought answers from authors or experts of a
lib, etc. to clarify what I didn't understand from documentation.

All of this is easier and frendlier with open systems. MS is coloring itself
more open recently, but they and the ecosystem built upon them and around them
have a long way to catch up. From my perspective the gap is so large and so
pervasive that I don't even bother kicking the tires any more. I don't know if
MS will make it there in my productive lifetime. If they do, I think the
ground will have to have shaken dramatically so many times that it will get my
attention. So, I will continue to ignore them until then.

------
united893
This is a side note, maybe it's been covered before. Has anyone noticed that
microsoft.com runs on Apache now?

[http://dpaste.com/3HTHQ96.txt](http://dpaste.com/3HTHQ96.txt)

~~~
sieabahlpark
Why would they bother paying nginx the outrageous price for their server?

~~~
the_common_man
Or use iis

~~~
jamra
Or use Kestrel, which should be able to be front facing. It does very well
with speed.

------
numlock86
> "major cloud provider uses linux more than windows"

Well, that's to be expected. Sorry, this is in the same category as "Huawei
CTO uses iPhones" or "amount X of Google employees use Surface Pro". I don't
quite get what the article is trying to tell me.

~~~
BoiledCabbage
Those are extremely poor analogies. You listed two things entirely irrelevant
to a business as comparisons to a key component to a business.

"Satya Nadella once used a linux computer" is the category of thing you
listed.

"Apple building android phones" would be a better snalogy for this.

~~~
belltaco
> "Apple building android phones" would be a better snalogy for this.

Not really. Apple selling Android phones at Apple Stores is probably the best
analogy.

~~~
mzeef
Apple opening an electronics market and selling washing machines, iPhones and
Android Smartphones and a lot of other things.

------
dimitar
Windows VMs in Azure are significantly more expensive than Linux VMs because
Microsoft still charges for the licenses. Only if your organization has
already purchased a lot of them it can use the Hybrid benefit to get similar,
but still higher prices.

Seems like a bad strategy for Windows Server in the long run, but they may
have decided that it is already dead.

------
ThinkBeat
I am on one hand glad that Linux is being adopted, but I am mostly sad.

We only have two operating systems now Windows and Linux. (MacOS for the
desktop as well).

It becomes a mono culture, and it takes away healthy competition and
innovation.

I want many more operating systems, not fewer.

I with MS would make it free to run Windows Server, (something they move
towards with the CLI only version). In order to hopefully increase adoptation.

I dont think that will happen as long as MS has a lot of enterprise custoemrs
who are paying huge for the Server licenses.

~~~
z3phyr
I want more "kinds" of operating systems. It is ripe time to look forward to
building ones not based on Unix, files, forks and execs. I want to explore
different ideas which were not tested because Unix model became popular.

There is a lot to explore on the side of Smalltalk machines, Oberon, Lisp
Machines of old. As a developer, live programming language based environments
is my kind of thing.

~~~
pjc50
Sure, but an OS that can't run a browser (i.e. it's difficult to port to) is
going to have a _massive_ adoption hurdle.

I was a big fan of the QNX demo floppy (1.44MB OS _with browser_ ), but that
didn't lead to me using it on the desktop.
[http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html)

~~~
cmiles74
It's too bad that web browsers are so complicated and expensive to port.

There might be room for something new and different that runs on it's own VM
(like Smalltalk) and can use libraries on the host to get things that do not
make sense re-implementing, like a web browser. If it gains sufficient
traction, the work to move it to a more stripped down environment would be
clearly worth it.

------
raylangivens
Microsoftie here, a lot of Microsoft's own infrastructure is hosted on Windows
Server instances.

Won't comment further than that, So Windows for server scenarios is certainly
not dead.

~~~
kabwj
I don’t see how the article says that “windows server is dead”. And Microsoft
infrastructure is obviously running on windows, I don’t think anybody expects
otherwise.

~~~
raylangivens
People would misconstrue the increased usage of Linux VMs on Azure to assume
Windows Server instances are no longer used for Server scenarios, which is not
the case.

------
hawaiian
My favorite part about Azure is that Microsoft shops are totally fine with
spinning up a Debian install simply because the image is available.

------
acd
Prediction for the future: Microsoft will open source Windows but sell
commercial support packages for it.

Windows server will be offered as a compatibility layer in Linux on top of
Docker.

~~~
z3phyr
On one end, I really like the open source movement;

Having said that, I can't do anything but blame it for the slow pace of
computer systems research. My reasoning is that the OS does not sell anymore
(partly due to FOSS movement) and thus research computing environments hardly
come out of the labs for use in production.

We are forever stuck with Unix's interpretation of what an OS could be, and
there is very little compulsion/motivation/incentive (can't think of the
correct word) to explore. People who do explore (example at MS research or
Later Bell labs, remains in the labs)

~~~
pjc50
This is not a new phenomenon, though; I was considering an OS research PhD all
the way back in 2000, in the research group that brought out Nemesis (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(operating_system)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_\(operating_system\))
) - but even back then I could see that the compatibility issue was a colossal
barrier. Back then we thought Windows had won the desktop and the UNIX-like
OSs would remain in a niche.

The only thing that disrupted that was mobile. First Symbian, then iOS and
Android. Sufficiently different use case that backwards compatibility was
rendered irrelevant.

~~~
gmueckl
I guess thus is the same kind of evilution that s lotnpf technology goes
through as it is adopted. Eventually, standards evolve (lane sizes, driving
sides, electrical voltages and current limits etc...) and because they are
adopted so widely, any change becomes almost impossible. C and UNIX look like
they are going to be that standard for the computing world for the next few
centuries.

------
quasi
Microsoft should do an Apple and build the Windows 13 on GNU/Linux.

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
Windows’ driver ecosystem is important to Windows’ market success - switching
out the kernel (and so, the driver interfaces) would throw that all away.

~~~
pjc50
.. unless they build an adapter.

If this sounds horrifying, consider that Windows already has a subsystem for
allowing graphics drivers to crash and restart seperately. The reverse also
exists:
[https://wiki.debian.org/NdisWrapper](https://wiki.debian.org/NdisWrapper)

------
arcosdev
Please release the Linux-flavoured Windows desktop OS Microsoft.

------
lacampbell
It's the default choice when you set up a VM.

------
paxys
I'm surprised it took this long. With Linux support for .NET and SQL Server,
there is zero reason to host anything new on Windows now (of course legacy
enterprise software is another story). I wouldn't be surprised if Windows
Server is fully EOL'd in a few years.

~~~
foepys
I can understand that for many Mac OS users it's hard to understand Windows.
When your OS vendor is requiring you to rewrite parts of your applications
each year because of changing APIs it's impossible to imagine a world where
applications from 1995 are still running on operating systems from 2019.
Same.with security updates for only 3 years where Windows gives you over a
decade time to upgrade.

But when you are a manufacturing company and just need to get your product
out, you don't care about your software. You want it running for as cheap as
possible. That's where Windows shines. Mac OS is explicitly unfit here. Same
with the hip technologies like nodejs that require constant attention.

Everybody gives Microsoft shit for moving slow but when was the last time you
had to _proof_ that your patch doesn't break compatibility with 20 year old
software that you can't even get anywhere anymore?

~~~
iaml
Didn't microsoft ditch QA and make several broken patches recently? I was
under impression testing new update rollout on your devices is still local
admin responsibility and can break things. How is it different that staggered
rollout of any other os update?

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Yeah, they've completely borked the Desktop side of things, it's true. However
the server side is much more conservative.

------
jandrese
Who wants to deal with licensing headaches on cloud servers? Plus if you want
to run headless then you need to go through the AD setup process to manage
Windows hosts, where the Linux hosts are fine with just ssh access.

------
neop1x
It's always fun to watch opinion changes to where the money is. Of course it's
not about freedom, community or niceness. Their revenue from cloud services is
growing fast. :)

------
jtdev
I wish MS would just create a Linux or BSD distro like Amazon Linux,
ClearLinux, Darwin etc. to replace Windows Server outright...

~~~
TallGuyShort
They could probably partner with Red Hat. I would've laughed at the idea 10
years ago, but these days, I wouldn't be that surprised. When they've had OS-
ish integrations needed for things like machine-based authentication, RHEL has
been treated like a first class citizen. I'm not sure how much Amazon Linux
really changes other than branding and some baked-in tuning - unless you're
really going to commit to maintaining the OS, just providing a minimal RHEL-
based image makes a lot of sense.

~~~
closeparen
Why would IBM undermine its own cloud like that though?

~~~
StreamBright
IBM is not a serious player in the cloud segment.

~~~
rurban
Did you forget that IBM bought Red Hat? It's one of the strongest cloud
players now.

~~~
StreamBright
I did not however, RedHat is not even remotely close to be one of a strongest
players. IBM is hoovering around 10%ish, RedHat has no cloud offering that
could be taken seriously. Most of the cloud vendors are competing in the
public cloud segment (even though with VPC this is arguably more complex
question) while RedHat focuses on private cloud, offering mostly OpenStack.

------
m0zg
This is great, IMO. The sooner MS abandons Windows on Azure the better for
everybody. You could argue that "monoculture" is not good, but, TBH, from a
purely pragmatic standpoint, I struggle to name a single use case where I'd
_not_ choose Linux over anything else when the use case is not desktop-
oriented (cloud, edge, embedded).

~~~
FigmentEngine
seems to me that windows is still where you are going to find better (or even
a driver) drivers for hardware. is this still true? if new cutting edge
hardware released does it now have good linux drivers? (sorry i was scarred by
the printing experience on linux)

~~~
jorams
Linux supports much more hardware than Windows. The situation with bad cutting
edge hardware support applies only on desktop machines, where manufacturers
don't bother with anything but the OS they put in the box.

