Don't know anyone's ages here, but is anyone fascinated by the historical implications of this? I started using Linux in the 90's and the talk in the community at the time was "world domination". It seems to me that's happened--more or less behind the scenes, but it's happened.
I couldn't disargee more about Microsoft's current place in tech markets. They've lost quite a lot of weight since their 800lb gorilla days in the 90s.
They used to exploit their dominant market position to replace de-facto standards with their own: kerberos "extensions", creating ActiveX instead of just implementing NPAPI, removing JNI from the MS JVM. But they can't do that any more. They lost too much ground under Ballmer.
Now they're nearly tripping over themselves promoting their cross-platform tolerance. Run Linux in our cloud! Run our apps on all the platforms! Sync/connect our apps/devices to any service!
Source: Age 34, started with Linux in '97 (Slackware 3.2)
I'm 35, started using Linux in '97 so I've been around for most of the history.
It's quite amazing how Microsoft has changed in that time tbh from "Embrace, Extinguish, Extend" and all the shenanigans they pulled with comparing Win2k vs Linux/Samba and the halloween memo through to submitting code to the kernel, using Linux as a guest in their VM stuff and now using it internally not to mention making .Net a first class citizen (which when it's done will be incredible, I love C# as a language but in Linux land it's not quite their yet compared to on Windows).
Yes, Linux has dominated the commodity server space. Look what happened to Sun & Solaris. But what about the desktop? Back in the late 90s there was much talk of how the Linux desktop would take over, KDE vs Gnome etc. IBM and Sun backed Open Office, Andy Herzfeld launched Nautilus. And then it didn't happen. MS still owns the business desktop with Windows & Office. And MS still has a big chunk of the consumer desktop, though Apple has taken a lot of it with MacOS.
People forget that MS used to have it's own Unix in the 80s: Xenix. I ported a large DEC PDP Fortran codebase to run on Xenix back then - it was far too big to fit in the 640K DOS limit. Writing the Xenix device driver for the 68000 powered graphics card in the PC was fun.
Microsoft are now moving quickly to allow users to run .NET on all platforms. How long until they decide that Windows Server is no longer worth investing in?
Or are there too many Microsoft server products earning good profits (i.e. Exchange and BizTalk), to make that switch a realistic future expectation?
I'm genuinely interested to hear people's opinions on their thoughts of the future of Microsoft and Windows Server.
Heavy Windows server user here. We have 100+ windows server 2008 R2 and 2012 R2 machines in production and a massive .Net/C# codebase.
Currently it's a complete bastard of an operating system. It's expensive, hard to manage even with powershell and DSC etc, difficult to update, difficult to provision, complicated and to be honest absolutely terrible licensing hell that costs us days a year. Hyper-V just adds complexity before anyone suggests that.
Exchange on-site deployments are dead. Everyone is moving away from them now and into Office 365 and Google Apps. There is no rational cost justification to use anything else now. Even the big orgs (5000+ staff) are moving off it as it's cheaper to get a fat pipe in than it is to keep 2-3 windows admins and a pile of kit and a SAN on the payroll just to run groupware.
Biztalk is also dead and has been for a few years. People who were using it heavily seem to be holding onto it due to cost reasons and everyone else who has been using it and have done any platform re-engineering have moved off to Windows Server AppFabric, NServiceBus and custom integrations or to AWS/SQS.
Microsoft are pushing Windows Server 2016 with container support as the up and coming new thing. I'm really not interested in this myself. I don't think anyone else is either other than a select number of core windows bloggers. It's simply a "me too" move.
As we re-engineer our application, what our endgame currently looks like is deploying disposable Linux VMs (CentOS) on AWS running ASP.Net 5/golang, microservices, lots of small PostgreSQL nodes (RDS) rather than massive 48 core SQL Server boxes, using OAuth2/OpenID authentication and getting rid of our extensive operations team who are incidentally more of an obstruction than an aid to the organisation.
IMHO Windows Server is probably circling the drain. There are very few places it fits in a modern business and this is only going to get worse going forth as well.
The remaining killer is Active Directory but you can already get Microsoft to deal with that for you on Azure, pre-integrated with Office 365 and sharepoint etc.
Microsoft I suspect will end up a services company like Google with some hardware being sold on the side. And you know what? That's fine.
"How long until they decide that Windows Server is no longer worth investing in ?"
Without hard data to support it, my impression (or better, my anecdotal experience) is that Windows Server has quite a strong hold in medium/large sized companies (not necessarily IT companies) as part of the local network infrastructure, and it's quite profitable for Microsoft.
I'm currently in my first nix job after years with Windows. It's a larger company (15k+ people) and using RedHat for it's linux solution (solaris/aix is also present). Honestly, I don't understand the $$$ argument at the enterprise level against msoft. Not only are you paying Redhat for support but their RPMs are about a year behind what's out there (that's a lot of time!). I'm trying to get .net (coreclr) compiled now on RHEL to play around but having a heck of a time b/c of all the old packages (btw- if anyone has instructions for this, __PLEASE__ send along).
Are other nix shops using Ubuntu for their servers?
As an hybrid kernel, able to do asynchronous IO better than open source UNIX clones, adoption of C++ instead of bare bones unsafe C and an OOP ABI (COM), I look forward to the existence of Windows as server OS.
There are lots of MS only shops out there and I don't see any of the changing in the near future.
imho, if Active Directory/ADAM ran on Linux demand for Windows Server would drop considerably. However Windows Server is also used to deliver Citrix-style remote desktops (using App Virtualization[1]) and that would be harder to replace. Also, SQL Server and Exchange use plenty of Windows-specific OS features -- it wouldn't be impossible to port to Linux but it would be a lot of work.
Microsoft's foray - I don't necessarily mean that in a negative way - into OS technologies doesn't surprise me any more.
I remember an MS Rep telling us one day:
> Our CEO believes that consumption is the new currency.
The context in which he used it seemed to imply that Nadella believes that the way forward for Microsoft is to not so much compete with existing products, but to give people new and better ways to consume existing ones, and of course to consume these existing products themselves. So it really doesn't surprise me that they've built their own Linux for Azure Stack, especially with guys like Cumulus Networks in the market.
Sooner or later Microsoft will just build his GUI on Top of Linux and sell that or sell the support like Redhat. That would mean a lot to the computing World.
When .NET runs on more Devices they could just port more and more compatibility.
Microsoft's post revealing ACS says a fair bit about its features but doesn't explain why Microsoft felt decided to do with Linux distro? Perhaps the complexity of the world's switching ecosystem was the reason: Redmond says it has demonstrated ACS across with “four ASIC vendors (Mellanox, Broadcom, Cavium, and the Barefoot software switch), six implementations of SAI (Broadcom, Dell, Mellanox, Cavium, Barefoot, and Metaswitch)....
Per an Azure blog posting yesterday (http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/switch-abstraction-int...): "As of July 2015, the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) specification has been officially accepted by the Open Compute Project (OCP) as a standardized C API to program ASICs."
To my very limited understanding of this space, FPGAs and cheaper application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are essential to high speed networking.
It is a question of switch control more than anything. They are losing Cisco software, etc... with cheaper Open Compute switches, so they need some means to configure them within Azure; in all respects, that's a benefit to Microsoft. Facebook did the same thing: https://code.facebook.com/posts/843620439027582/facebook-ope...
Yes, the ASIC vendors provide drivers for Linux but not for Windows. MSR ported the Broadcom driver to Windows in the past, but it looks like Azure decided to take the path of least resistance.
Interix. Microsoft's Unix. It runs on the NT kernel alongside win32 as another process personality. Most windowses come with the Interix core, and you can get the userland part from Microsoft --- it's called Services For Unix these days, I think. It even comes with GCC. It's a pretty nice piece of work, behaving just like an old school Unix.
But it's largely been abandoned by Microsoft and is buggy as hell and difficult to install; and its an old old-school Unix, so it's missing a lot of the modern system calls and libraries that make Unixes nice. (I don't even know if win10 supports it.)
I'm not familiar with Mono or any of the .Net on Linux efforts, so forgive my ignorance. However, having a running .Net stack with a CLR VM and class libs is not the whole story when it comes to running Windows native server side stuff. One of the things I've discovered building spreadserve.com is that there's a lot of COM & Registry plumbing necessary to enable Windows native desktop binaries to run in a server environment. So I imagine running real .Net based servers on Linux would require something like Wine to supply ABI compatible interfaces to the registry and COM services, and lots else beside. That's a non trivial undertaking. The MS Linux described in the Register story sounds like it's dedicated to networking tasks. I'd bet there's no .Net running on it at all.
AFAIK Microsoft uses Mellanox Infiniband networking in Azure. So this Linux distro is most likely controlling Mellanox hardware. Do you know which Mellanox model of infiband switches they use?
More than just an OS, I think what they've built is a Network OS (NOS) on top of Linux. They have been involved in Switch Abstraction Interface(SAI) specifications from Open Compute Networking Projects from early days. I am excited what this brings on the table in Software Defined Networking. I really hope they open source their SAI implementation, and their NOS can be used with ONIE. So I could get a bare metal switch, install their NOS, and build network apps for my use-cases.
I used Windows for a little over a decade, then I discarded it one day when I suddenly realized that the proprietary OS actually never taught me anything about computers. Those precious 10 years went to waste. I'm ashamed to say that I couldn't discover Linux until about 5 years ago.
Lesson: Microsoft is willing to improve their proprietary offerings using leveraging free software others built. This is the main reason for FOSS uptake everywhere and makes great business sense for them. They also make a killing in patent royalties on the Android ecosystem. If anything, Nadella is focusing Microsoft more on the dollar than prior politics.
It's the same Microsoft, though, far as I can tell with many of the same tricks. All the spyware and schemes in their recent products confirms that. They shouldn't be trusted. People need to move away from their tech wherever possible. Except maybe the stuff like this that's built on tech someone can inspect, fork and/or clone.
On the other hand, that wasn't public like this. But it's a far cry from the two tries required to replace Hotmail's front end Apache FreeBSD servers with IIS? NT a decade or so earlier. Or the much more recent Danger Hiptop/Sidekick NetBSD + Java + sane servers -> Windows CE + Exchange that in probably the largest part doomed their $1 billion Kin effort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin which took only weeks to fail hard once it hit the market.
[+] [-] drnewman|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisArgyle|10 years ago|reply
They used to exploit their dominant market position to replace de-facto standards with their own: kerberos "extensions", creating ActiveX instead of just implementing NPAPI, removing JNI from the MS JVM. But they can't do that any more. They lost too much ground under Ballmer.
Now they're nearly tripping over themselves promoting their cross-platform tolerance. Run Linux in our cloud! Run our apps on all the platforms! Sync/connect our apps/devices to any service!
Source: Age 34, started with Linux in '97 (Slackware 3.2)
[+] [-] noir_lord|10 years ago|reply
It's quite amazing how Microsoft has changed in that time tbh from "Embrace, Extinguish, Extend" and all the shenanigans they pulled with comparing Win2k vs Linux/Samba and the halloween memo through to submitting code to the kernel, using Linux as a guest in their VM stuff and now using it internally not to mention making .Net a first class citizen (which when it's done will be incredible, I love C# as a language but in Linux land it's not quite their yet compared to on Windows).
[+] [-] osullivj|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snnn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaigepr|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] osullivj|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] junto|10 years ago|reply
Or are there too many Microsoft server products earning good profits (i.e. Exchange and BizTalk), to make that switch a realistic future expectation?
I'm genuinely interested to hear people's opinions on their thoughts of the future of Microsoft and Windows Server.
[+] [-] buffoon|10 years ago|reply
Currently it's a complete bastard of an operating system. It's expensive, hard to manage even with powershell and DSC etc, difficult to update, difficult to provision, complicated and to be honest absolutely terrible licensing hell that costs us days a year. Hyper-V just adds complexity before anyone suggests that.
Exchange on-site deployments are dead. Everyone is moving away from them now and into Office 365 and Google Apps. There is no rational cost justification to use anything else now. Even the big orgs (5000+ staff) are moving off it as it's cheaper to get a fat pipe in than it is to keep 2-3 windows admins and a pile of kit and a SAN on the payroll just to run groupware.
Biztalk is also dead and has been for a few years. People who were using it heavily seem to be holding onto it due to cost reasons and everyone else who has been using it and have done any platform re-engineering have moved off to Windows Server AppFabric, NServiceBus and custom integrations or to AWS/SQS.
Microsoft are pushing Windows Server 2016 with container support as the up and coming new thing. I'm really not interested in this myself. I don't think anyone else is either other than a select number of core windows bloggers. It's simply a "me too" move.
As we re-engineer our application, what our endgame currently looks like is deploying disposable Linux VMs (CentOS) on AWS running ASP.Net 5/golang, microservices, lots of small PostgreSQL nodes (RDS) rather than massive 48 core SQL Server boxes, using OAuth2/OpenID authentication and getting rid of our extensive operations team who are incidentally more of an obstruction than an aid to the organisation.
IMHO Windows Server is probably circling the drain. There are very few places it fits in a modern business and this is only going to get worse going forth as well.
The remaining killer is Active Directory but you can already get Microsoft to deal with that for you on Azure, pre-integrated with Office 365 and sharepoint etc.
Microsoft I suspect will end up a services company like Google with some hardware being sold on the side. And you know what? That's fine.
[+] [-] Kurtz79|10 years ago|reply
Without hard data to support it, my impression (or better, my anecdotal experience) is that Windows Server has quite a strong hold in medium/large sized companies (not necessarily IT companies) as part of the local network infrastructure, and it's quite profitable for Microsoft.
[+] [-] rottyguy|10 years ago|reply
Are other nix shops using Ubuntu for their servers?
[+] [-] pjmlp|10 years ago|reply
There are lots of MS only shops out there and I don't see any of the changing in the near future.
[+] [-] signal11|10 years ago|reply
[1] https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/hh397409.aspx
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilitirit|10 years ago|reply
I remember an MS Rep telling us one day:
> Our CEO believes that consumption is the new currency.
The context in which he used it seemed to imply that Nadella believes that the way forward for Microsoft is to not so much compete with existing products, but to give people new and better ways to consume existing ones, and of course to consume these existing products themselves. So it really doesn't surprise me that they've built their own Linux for Azure Stack, especially with guys like Cumulus Networks in the market.
[+] [-] frik|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] merb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] x5n1|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hga|10 years ago|reply
Microsoft's post revealing ACS says a fair bit about its features but doesn't explain why Microsoft felt decided to do with Linux distro? Perhaps the complexity of the world's switching ecosystem was the reason: Redmond says it has demonstrated ACS across with “four ASIC vendors (Mellanox, Broadcom, Cavium, and the Barefoot software switch), six implementations of SAI (Broadcom, Dell, Mellanox, Cavium, Barefoot, and Metaswitch)....
Per an Azure blog posting yesterday (http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/switch-abstraction-int...): "As of July 2015, the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) specification has been officially accepted by the Open Compute Project (OCP) as a standardized C API to program ASICs."
To my very limited understanding of this space, FPGAs and cheaper application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are essential to high speed networking.
[+] [-] knorby|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmf|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrbig4545|10 years ago|reply
There's no denying the NT kernel is an excellent piece of engineering.
[+] [-] david-given|10 years ago|reply
But it's largely been abandoned by Microsoft and is buggy as hell and difficult to install; and its an old old-school Unix, so it's missing a lot of the modern system calls and libraries that make Unixes nice. (I don't even know if win10 supports it.)
[+] [-] joosters|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] osullivj|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buffoon|10 years ago|reply
As for .Net, ASP.Net 5 runs fine on Linux and OSX without any COM or registry dependencies. It is entirely platform portable and open source.
[+] [-] acd|10 years ago|reply
"InfiniBand enables the most efficient cloud – Microsoft Azure" source: http://www.mellanox.com/related-docs/applications/TOP500_NOV...
[+] [-] nitinics|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] srisaila|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|10 years ago|reply
Is Microsoft doing an IBM-like refocusing?
[+] [-] nickpsecurity|10 years ago|reply
It's the same Microsoft, though, far as I can tell with many of the same tricks. All the spyware and schemes in their recent products confirms that. They shouldn't be trusted. People need to move away from their tech wherever possible. Except maybe the stuff like this that's built on tech someone can inspect, fork and/or clone.
[+] [-] hga|10 years ago|reply
On the other hand, that wasn't public like this. But it's a far cry from the two tries required to replace Hotmail's front end Apache FreeBSD servers with IIS? NT a decade or so earlier. Or the much more recent Danger Hiptop/Sidekick NetBSD + Java + sane servers -> Windows CE + Exchange that in probably the largest part doomed their $1 billion Kin effort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin which took only weeks to fail hard once it hit the market.
[+] [-] kickingvegas|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tkubacki|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] w8rbt|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] werber|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pwarner|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] droithomme|10 years ago|reply
No, they haven't.