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Ubuntu Is the Dominant Cloud OS
An anonymous reader writes: According to a new report by Cloud Market, Ubuntu is more than twice as popular on Amazon EC2 as all other operating systems combined. Given that Amazon Web Services has 57% of the public cloud market, Ubuntu is clearly the most popular OS for cloud systems. This is further bolstered by a recent OpenStack survey, which found that more than half of respondents used Ubuntu for cloud-based production environments. Centos was a distant second at 29%, and RHEL came in third at 11%. "In addition to AWS, Ubuntu has been available on HP Cloud, and Microsoft Azure since 2013. It's also now available on Google Cloud Platform, Fujitsu, and Joyent." The article concludes, "People still see Ubuntu as primarily a desktop operating system. It's not — and hasn't been for some time."
The same as MS Windows. It is just the one people know. That does not make it a good choice for the cloud, just a familiar one. Judging technological quality from numbers used by a non-expert or mixed crowd is not a valid way to judge merit and suitability.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
What the fuck is a "Cloud OS"?
Fuck marketingspeak forever.
http://i.imgur.com/91sn32Q.jpg...
RedHat got into the datacenter by being a popular desktop distro, people setting things up in the datacenter used what they were familiar with.
People have been predicting that RedHat would run into this sort of problem ever since they abandoned the home/workstation market. It's taken a lot longer than I expected, but it's happening.
RedHat was able to hold this off for a while by getting the datacenter managers to mandate standardization, but in AWS such rules are far less enforced.
David Lang
Nobody in the datacenter uses Ubuntu desktop. they use server. and in fact I see far more CentOS/Redhat than Ubuntu simply because enterprise tools like Oracle has support for redHat.
Ubuntu desktop is an abomination unless you install Kubuntu or Xubuntu. nobody sane like standard Ubuntu, just like how nobody sane likes windows 8/8.1
Their data appears to be pulled from thin air too.
Centos was a distant second at 29%, and RHEL came in third at 11%
Apparently the poster does not realize that these are really the same thing?
All this tells me is that 57% are hacks. Ubuntu is a good enough OS for desktops, but servers are precisely where it should not be used.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Ubuntu is more popular than Linux? Remind me again how that works.
That's just a dramatic way of saying “>67% market share.”
Ubuntu is a good enough OS for desktops, but servers are precisely where it should not be used.
Could you explain in more detail why you believe Ubuntu Server is unsuitable for servers? What change from Debian makes it unsuitable? Or is Debian likewise unsuitable?
RedHat got into the datacenter by being a popular desktop distro, people setting things up in the datacenter used what they were familiar with.
People have been predicting that RedHat would run into this sort of problem ever since they abandoned the home/workstation market. It's taken a lot longer than I expected, but it's happening.
RedHat was able to hold this off for a while by getting the datacenter managers to mandate standardization, but in AWS such rules are far less enforced.
David Lang
I don't feel like RedHat abandoned the home/workstation market, both my home and work desktop run Fedora 22.
As for AWS who is using those machines? My gut is these are individuals or small shops willing to pay for cloud hosting but unwilling to pay the extra for support. For instance CentOS is beating RHEL 29% to 11%, granted I'm not sure what support you get for RHEL in AWS but I doubt there's any reason to use CentOS over RHEL in the cloud aside from cost. I tried switching to Ubuntu for my personal cloud server but went to CentOS instead.
My hunch is the vast majority of those Ubuntu VMs aren't paying any support and thus wouldn't really impact RedHat's bottom line anyway. It's when paid businesses go to Ubuntu they have to worry, but the requirements of the customers willing to pay out big money for licenses and support are vastly different than those of desktop users.
I stole this Sig
RTFA: Ubuntu has approximately 135,000 instances. In second place, a long, long way back, you'll find Amazon's own Amazon Linux Amazon Machine Image (AMI), with 54,000. Lagging even farther behind, there's Windows with 17,600 instances. In fourth and fifth place, you'll find CentOS, 8,500, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), 5,600.
"Ubuntu is more than twice as popular on Amazon EC2 as all other operating systems combined."
This means that Ubuntu has not less than 2/3's "market share," or 66% of installed O/Ses. If we assume that they would have said "three times" at 75%, we'll put that as an upper bound.
"Given that Amazon Web Services has 57% of the public cloud market, Ubuntu is clearly the most popular OS for cloud systems."
So, up to 75% of 57% of the market, or 42.75% of the total market, is guaranteed to be Ubuntu, but we have no other data in TFS to say anything about the remaining 43%.
So no, I would not say that Ubuntu "very clearly" is the most popular cloud OS, from the data given in TFS.
Since Ubuntu was/is a very easy to use desktop environment, it has become familiar to a lot of people. Those people ended up developing cloud services and stuck to what they are familiar with, Ubuntu. It's that simple.
I know if I were to setup a Linux server, Ubuntu or Mint would be my first choices. Not because they are best suited for a server environment. Because I am familiar with them on the desktop.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I saw this coming for a decade now. Ubuntu worked very hard to earn the mind share of Desktop Linux users and, once it became their preferred distro, it was only the natural consequence that their desktop counterpart became their main choice.
Redhat was extremely stupid to just think Linux as a server business and completely let go the Desktop. They aimed at only being a competitor of old server unixes instead of generating a new market.
They still have time to turn this one around (specially as Ubuntu is now wasting resources on going mobile), but as long as they keep supporting a controversial desktop environment (Gnome 3) and don't care about being friendly to new users (Fedora is nowhere near as friendly or usable as Ubuntu), they'll lose the battle in the long run.
Actually RHEL is being dumped across the board and it's 100% related to their insane new licensing. We're in the midst of migrating all our RHEL boxes to centOS at the moment. While under the hood these are essentially identical systems (you can ram redhat packages onto them if you want), and the majority of our services function just fine on the new boxes, this was done because of the licensing.
And no, sorry, Ubuntu, the windows of linux, is not the best choice for anything. I spent a lot of work getting my FOG server to actually work on ubuntu 12 server, it was a mess and I ended up duct-taping Ubuntu 10 and 12 together with fog to make it do what I wanted. The rest of the system was debian because that shit just works. Ubuntu is the OS i'll direct my grandparents at (if they all weren't dead) when they want something other than windows, because for all intents and purposes, it's windows on linux.
RedHat (as well as SuSE and Oracle Linux) had one good item that helped get enterprise acceptance. They were tested and passed FIPS and Common Criteria. Does this mean much in the real world? Not really. Does it help come audit time? Yes.
Problem is that RedHat is losing familarity with people since it isn't in the desktop/home/workstation market. Yes, there are plenty of downstreams, but having people familar with RHEL proper in their home playground can mean more RHCEs and more RedHat installs in the enterprise.
What is hurting RedHat is that there are a number of applications which require selective distributions of Linux. Take NetBackup, for example. However, on the cheap, NetBackup is supported on Oracle Linux, and Oracle Linux is "free", but can get a support contract. When a place goes with UBL, that is one less RH install.
Yes, CentOS is pretty much RedHat. However, it isn't RedHat, and that fact alone can be a big thing when it comes to application support. I slap NetBackup on CentOS, the Symantec would laugh their derriere off if I called in for support.
I run an Ubuntu server in EWS, it hosts my Teamspeak 3 server so that I don't have to worry about my home server's uptime.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Anything but distros still accomplish what they promise.
It's when paid businesses go to Ubuntu they have to worry, but the requirements of the customers willing to pay out big money for licenses and support are vastly different than those of desktop users
And here's the rub, they made the desktop platform pretty bleeding edge (major kernel changes are inflicted in routine updates, breaking things like nvidia driver if you choose to use it, not merely being mostly unhelpful about closed source realities but actively making it more painful). Even if drivers didn't break, updates can change things dramatically at a whim, and there's no blessed 'long term' servicing branch that so nearly matches their 6 month cycle releases like Ubuntu does. RedHat is making the free situation needlessly complicated and risky to push people to RHEL, but instead are giving ubuntu the free market. Like you say, the free market by itself is no huge threat, but it influences the commercial market in the long term.
You could also say RedHat has very little to lose by having something more like Ubuntu in lifecycle out there for free. Those folks won't pay for anything, but their mindshare is valuable among the audience that will pay.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Let's just suppose that this claim is actually true:
Ubuntu is more than twice as popular on Amazon EC2 as all other operating systems combined.
Immediately afterwards:
Given that Amazon Web Services has 57% of the public cloud market, Ubuntu is clearly the most popular OS for cloud systems.
Certainly, 'clearly' is used erroneously here. 67% of 57% market is about 38% which is a long way off from showing that Ubuntu is the most popular OS for all cloud systems. Sure, these things could be true, but if you're going to pretend to do math, your fake numbers should at least line up.
from the ./ summary:
"People still see Ubuntu as primarily a desktop operating system. It's not — and hasn't been for some time."
Well there is a distinction between Ubuntu being the primary desktop Linux OS and it being primarily a desktop operating system. The poster conflates those claims by asserting the first while prior surveys supported the latter. And he is too quick to dismiss, and therefore to overlook, what is likely critical to Ubuntu cloud adaption: We want to run in the could what we already run on the desktop. It's familiar. We know how the package manager works and we do not have re-learn all those other differences between distributions which we stumble over and have to look up when moving between them. Sure, not hard to sort out, but who wants to? And who wants to keep 2X all those distribution-dependent details in their head? I think most people are like myself in this respect; pleased to learn fundamental Unix/Linux concepts, annoyed and pestered by details specific to particular distributions. Now what flavor of Linux am I on and where did it keep its config file for this?
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
It's when paid businesses go to Ubuntu they have to worry, but the requirements of the customers willing to pay out big money for licenses and support are vastly different than those of desktop users
And here's the rub, they made the desktop platform pretty bleeding edge (major kernel changes are inflicted in routine updates, breaking things like nvidia driver if you choose to use it, not merely being mostly unhelpful about closed source realities but actively making it more painful). Even if drivers didn't break, updates can change things dramatically at a whim, and there's no blessed 'long term' servicing branch that so nearly matches their 6 month cycle releases like Ubuntu does. RedHat is making the free situation needlessly complicated and risky to push people to RHEL, but instead are giving ubuntu the free market. Like you say, the free market by itself is no huge threat, but it influences the commercial market in the long term.
So maybe not all people like the bleeding edge and new fancy stuff like I do though I suspect Fedora's primary trouble comes from RedHat seeming too corporate and people going to what looks like a more community oriented distro.
You could also say RedHat has very little to lose by having something more like Ubuntu in lifecycle out there for free. Those folks won't pay for anything, but their mindshare is valuable among the audience that will pay.
That matters for sure, but when you're looking at an IT system responsible for millions or even billions of dollars then things like enterprize support and a dedicated server OS designed with stability in mind become really important. Whether or not you enjoy using that particular Linux flavour at home becomes really a non-factor really quickly.
I stole this Sig
I would think most people using cloud systems find the OS on their devices the least important aspect of cloud. Its no more interesting then most Google employee's use Mac's and not Chromebook's. Even though Google makes a very capable and comparable Chromebook to the Macbooks. They use Mac's for reasons that make it more practical. If a end computer user would have a open mind. They could use any OS platform from Windows, to the many versions of Linux, Unix, or Chrome OS. Its just what your willing to learn and use. The only reason people get stuck on Windows is because of software titles or specialty software that only runs Windows. Otherwise you could run whatever you wanted to.
"Nobody in the datacenter uses Ubuntu desktop. they use server."
Is there *any single package* that is different between the server and desktop versions? I mean, is it the postfix package from the server version any different from the desktop one?
In other words, is there any difference at all if you are using "desktop" or "server" versions?
Since when does Amazon disclose any data on the amount of instances running?
The default packages selected, mostly. Used to be that the server LTS version was supported for longer, but no longer true.
My last project, I chose CentOS 6. But I literally had it down to which LTS OS had the most recent release so I didn't have to worry about a distro upgrade for longer.
That's right, RHEL/CentOS separates security updates with feature updates. Ubuntu doesn't do this
In my experience, an Ubuntu LTS release doesn't get feature updates other than hardware support. Feature updates come every two years to the LTS track. What am I missing?
Ubuntu knows as much about "long-term support" as Microsoft knows about "user choice".
Signed someone with too many Ubuntu 12.04 servers who got spoiled by a Unix that understands long-term support should last longer than a high-school romance. http://www-01.ibm.com/software/support/aix/lifecycle/
This just demonstrates one very valuable fact for any hopeful cloud OS wannabe: If your desktop environment sucks 'because you're a cloud OS', then you won't be a Cloud OS.
If the admin can't get familiar with your OS on their personal desktop, they are not going to think of using you in a mission critical place. The best server OS has to be a good personal OS too or it will never become popular enough. RHEL started off as just RedHat, one of the better distributions for Linux. 'EL' was just a backend change to the same comfortable front end, just as Windows Server is familiar for those who use Windows as their primary desktop.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
When Oracle started supporting RheHat was when they thought they had the lock on the distro selection.
There are a lot of companies who run RHEL because that's what they can get support on.
The people who are running Ubuntu on their servers are not the same ones who buy expensive packages like NetBackup and pay for support for them. They are the ones who are running their own software, that they won't get support from anyone else (or the support is the opensource community, which support the more recent versions in Ubuntu better than they support the ancient versions in RHEL)
Especially with cloud servers, you recreate the system rather than backing it up.
When everyone was running RedHat on their desktop, rpm commands were natural and everyone knew where to find the config files
As more people are running Debian derived distros, they default to apt commands and the Debian layout. Ubuntu has the mindshare and offers the LTS versions, so you see more Ubuntu than Debian.
David Lang
That matters for sure, but when you're looking at an IT system responsible for millions or even billions of dollars then things like enterprize support and a dedicated server OS designed with stability in mind become really important. Whether or not you enjoy using that particular Linux flavour at home becomes really a non-factor really quickly.
EXACTLY this. I manage systems that have billions of dollars in revenue cross them per year. My customers wouldn't be caught dead without 24/7 support, OS-level support, and someone to sue if something does sideways. You also need to understand that hosting and OS licensing costs are almost nothing when you cross into revenue numbers like that.
They used to use a different kernel package with different tunings, but that hasn't been the case since 12.04.
Doesn't surprise me a great deal. Ubuntu SERVER (Not desktop - sheesh...) is a decent enough distro with most of the more worrisome components removed. Considering cloud services are particularly suited for development, testing and PoC work I wouldn't be too surprised if a large number of those Ubuntu installs are exactly that - unsupported, short-term instances set up as part of a testing rollout or some other service under development.
Stable, longer term services are more likely to be found on RHEL (with CentOS as the testing or QA instances).
That being said, Canonical *does* offer support for Ubuntu server and with it some nice management tools (Landscape, I think?) so who knows.
Ubuntu's strong point is convenience. It's quick and easy to use if there's a lot of build up, tear down going on. CentOS/RHEL have a deserved reputation for being more conservative and more stable but the lack of tight integration and ready-to-go defaults would be a mark against them in such a situation. However it's the reverse for any service you're providing via Linux thats stable and needs to be reliable for the very long term.
Hi mom.
"They used to use a different kernel package with different tunings, but that hasn't been the case since 12.04."
No. All kernels were available in both the "server" and "desktop" versions. It was the one installed by default, at most.
Not true. I brought RedHat into a number of data centers, though I was using slackware. RedHat was just way better. IMHO it's better then debian/ubuntu. I keep giving ubuntu a chance, keeps disappointing me. Sometimes not even installing such that it will boot. When it does, it often won't even sync with the wifi. Something they lifted from RedHat - works there and works well, however. Maybe I'll try it again soon.
Debian is a joke. Some secure baseline groups, I haven't seen a posting in years. It's like *dead*. Buried. Still true believers out there.
Being the most popular does not mean the best choice, especially in Amazon's cloud where most people would be using it for development and testing, not necessarily production. The last few places I worked production was all RHEL. Development and testing projects went to EC2 and CentOS. This was not a "CentOS is better" consideration, it was exclusively a pricing consideration. Ubuntu is the same, where it's mostly free and lots of the fad followers still think Ubuntu is better than other OSes because it's simple to setup. For a workstation I'd agree that it's easier for a non Admin to setup. There is no advantages and some disadvantages when using it for a server other than a simple Web/DB server.
IMHO the problem with any of these statistics reports is that it does not demonstrate reality in any way, shape, or form. Like all statistics, it's intentionally worded to mislead people. From the title, you would think that the Hyper-visor is Ubuntu but it's not. TFA also makes a wild ass guess because Amazon said it's the most used for them and they own 57% of the cloud market. You don't have to be a math wizard to see how that speculation could easily be wrong (Amazon never said that 98% of their client nodes are running Ubuntu).
Personally, I see Ubuntu exactly like MS. It's controlled by the Brits who have more intrusion ability by the Government than the US (with US help of course). I don't trust either, and won't use either. That does not mean I'm running out to pay for RHEL licenses. I'll use a good trusted free OS like Debian or CentOS over MS or Canonical's Ubuntu. Sometimes free makes lots of sense, and other times you want the pay for support.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Much elitism, huh?
Are you saying our entire team of high-skilled software engineers, including myself, are insane for liking Unity?
RedHat has had a great trimester, with fantastic increase in revenues. Their growth has been with the cloud, with arm hardware, with areas that stress performance, reliability and serviceability (RAS).
I too, use Fedora22. actually two Remixes of Fedora. One is titled Chapeaulinux, other Korora. Both are superb. Even after two months with each, I am torn between two extreme likes. I like both equally, and thus, on even days I use Chapeau, and on odd days I use Korora. My home directory is common to the two.
And I will be in the cloud by yearend with my software.
Excelente sistema operativo ubuntu MundoNet
The problem for RH becomes that on top of being wildly successful in the free market, Canonical also promises 24x7 commercial support. People can bitch and moan about their opinion of the quality of that support, but RH simply cannot pretend that they are the only ones that check off that marketing bullet point.
This further reinforces my opinion that RH has pretty much nothing to lose by making RH 'free' and charging for support, rather than this 'sort of not quite' in between state that they are in now by pretending CentOS and RH are different and never should the two mix...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.