Microsoft: Linux Is the Top Operating System on Azure Today (opens in new tab)

> Plus, Linux is way lighter when compared to Windows.

More specifically than just "lighter", the Linux distro metaphor and ecosystems have already adapted to decomposed use cases. You can run the same Debian or whatever image in a Docker container that you do on the bare server (or RPi/SBC) that you do in a Desktop VM or a Xen cloud host. Your ssh-based deployment and maintenance scripting works the same, etc...

Windows gets sticky and weird the farther you get from a desktop deployment. It's a soup of special case tooling and "Here's How You Do This One Thing". So when those things change, Linux folks just tweak their install scripts a bit where Windows users need to wait for someone to Design a Product for the niche.

This is what everyone was saying back at the dawn of cloud hosting, and it's exactly how it's played out. Windows can be made to work, but... why would you?

    > Windows as an OS is not as resilient as Linux when it comes to non-ideal operating conditions.

I'd disagree with this statement on the grounds that Windows has to run across the most heterogenous set of hardware and configurations of any of the major OSes. That it doesn't fail more often is a testament to its resiliency. It supports the $200 junkbox your gran bought from Walmart to $20,000 enterprise racks and is expected to support all of those different workloads and insane variety of software that can be installed. In contrast, I'd make the case that the majority of Linux distros are running in large data centers like AWS, Azure, and GCP where there's a relatively high degree of homogeneity of the underlying hardware and the operating environment on top of that.

macOS, for example, operates a comparatively limited set of hardware platforms.

This is also a distribution problem. If there was a distro with NT kernel, SSH and core services it could run on the same hardware.

Yep. My MacBook and Debian servers act pretty similar from a cli perspective. If it’s in apt it’s nearly always in brew

a while ago there was a bit of fuss about Windows having introduced something very similar to containers... in the sense that you could spawn small windows "instances" (I don't remember the correct name) and run applications in there. similar to "containers" (as a bunch of namespaces) rather than jails rather than zones.

IIRC Kubernetes could have windows node as well?

EDIT: yep... https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/windows/intro/

The easy way is Server Core and its available in Azure. I posted about it below.

It makes Windows hard to operate in a “servers are cattle, not pets” environment, though my experience is limited so I’m open to corrections.

That then makes Windows less appealing to the infra-as-code crowd, which is growing to be “almost everyone” these days.

It’s not just having an image with those things, it’s the entire surrounding ecosystem. Eg my experience with exe or msi installers is that using them without a GUI ranges from “difficult to find the right CLI switches” to “just not gonna happen”.

Also, I think a lot of that com crap is used by Powershell, so gutting it also means giving up CLI access to stuff.

You mean like they did almost a decade ago when they released Nano Server? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/iis/get-started/whats-new-... etc

there's still tons of steps to run an app on it, and they all require a gui and manual input.

There's some automation, but the maturity level is 2/10 compared to linux.

So there's a chicken-egg issue that Windows doesn't provide adequate automation out of the box to create the automation ecosystem that has led to the turnkey solutions available to linux customers.

As well as Azure App Service on Windows. The deployment looks just like deploying to Azure App Service on Linux. I use Azure App Service on Windows to deploy web applications, although the CMS software I use does now support Linux. I then make use of Azure SQL Server to run my database.

I think this is oversimplifying things a bit. There are many workloads running on Linux that also pay licensing for RHEL, SLES and Ubuntu Pro.

It really comes down to the requirements for your app as defined by the vendor and/or the internal team.

Microsoft charges, Linux does not.

That's one option of many but not the only way to license.

you're not thinking about the sales channel.

It's more lucrative to license Windows + SQL server + MS 365 + etc etc than hourly VM rates.

For general compute yes, that is correct. A good chunk of the work that we do is making sure that that HostOS plays nicely with Linux guests and vice-versa.

They always liked to dogfeed their own stuff even when it makes no sense whatsoever

Azure uses Hyper-V behind the scenes

Thanks for posting that. This post had nothing to do with Satya nor did he or anyone aside from myself and a couple other team mates see it before posting.

I really fail to see how interacting with the community to see how we feel could possibly be negative. Sure theyre doing it to push their product, but theyre also doing it to see where they need to improve.

The NFS protocol does not support all the functions of a "native" filesystem running on a block device.

NFS is fine for configuration files or read only. But workloads that do any sort of intensive writes will probably not like NFS, from SQLite up.

The newest NFS versions might fix some of the issues around caching that cause problems for write operations though.

NFS requires a custom VNet. Using a fully managed environment is important to us.

That has been true for decades?

According to the same page, he is not a fan of Unix. I assume he is not a fan of Linux by extension.

Same, but moreover, I consider the “windows” part of my dev experience to be entirely worthless and advise my son to not bother with anything Windows specific. Our lives are finite, might as well learn stuff that is Free and that has lasting value.

they do talk about actual usage in the talk, but only vcpu wise, not instance wise. For vcpus it's also more than 60% linux