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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."
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
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?
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
Well, if you could read instead of just looking at the pretty pictures, you would see that what is labeled Linux is Amazons own Linux image.
RHEL has good 3rd party support for when you need it. RedHat also spends a lot of work and money on compliance testing (e.g. Common Criteria and SCAP). This helps out with HIPAA and PCI regulation. It helps fill out that little check box so we all can get back to worrying about real security. I personally use RedHat's IdM (which is really FreeIPA). FreeIPA is awesome.
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.
It's almost as bloated with junk as the desktop version. I've been telling our developers to use debian over ubuntu. A base minimal container with Debian is under a 100 megs. With Ubuntu it's close to 700 megs. There's just too much stuff included by default. That means a whole bunch of things that could be potential security problems. Sure, you have to set up more in the Dockerfile since so little is included, but I consider that a feature, not a bug.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Sure. In server environments, your aggressive patch management schedule should only target security updates. That's right, RHEL/CentOS separates security updates with feature updates. Ubuntu doesn't do this, which really puts it in a class of a hobby/garage server or desktop.
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.
Debian STABLE is not Debian without bugs. Debian UNSTABLE is not Debian with bugs.
Debian STABLE is a snapshot of the rolling release that Debian actually is with the promise/guarantee that no part of the system will ever get an update except for security fixes. That means that when a Debian STABLE is released with kernel version 2.6.25, than 8 years later the kernel version will still be 2.6.25 even when kernel version 5.2.3 is available. What the Debian people do however is to port any security fixes back to the 2.6.25 kernel.
Debian UNSTABLE doesn't guarantee that libraries or programs don't get an upgrade. It is possible for Debian UNSTABLE to see an upgrade from LibreOffice 4.x to LibreOffice 5.x, which might cause incompatibility issues with software that relies on those packages. Debian UNSTABLE also might upgrade from kernel 2.6.25 to kernel 3.0.1 which might break support for your hardware.
Ubuntu takes a snapshot from the Debian UNSTABLE release and than does the same as what Debian does with their STABLE release. They promise that the packages remain the same but port any security fixes that are made in newer version back into the old versions that are in the STABLE release. But Ubuntu is also more than that. Ubuntu pulls in a lot of packages from Debian, but they also add a lot of packages of their own. (Unity is just an example)
In this regard Ubuntu is not different than Debian. Ubuntu just has more resources and is able to bring more 'snapshots' of the rolling release to a stable version. Once every 1/2 year you will see a normal stable Ubuntu, once every 2(?) you will see a stable release with LTS. This doesn't mean that Ubuntu is always bug free. But the LTS release gets a lot more attention and less bleeding edge versions and should be good enough for servers. I've never had any problem with Ubuntu server. The only problem with Ubuntu versus some other offerings like Red Hat is that the support time of the LTS version of Ubuntu is pretty short (only 5 years). It really depends on your project whether this is good enough for your situation. Debian doesn't even have such a LTS version. You only have to guess when Debian stops supporting their OS. It might be that their next stable release is 'done' in time. It might be that it takes longer as expected and you get another year of bug fixes. You do not know for sure. That doesn't make Debian a bad OS, but it clearly makes it an OS that doesn't fit in some companies policies.
But again:
- STABLE only means that package version don't change and that only security fixes are added.
- TESTING is the next stable version, without the promise that newer version are installed that might break the system. TESTING is the 'beta' version of the next STABLE release and it is were the compatibility issues between the different packages and libraries are tested and fixed. Sometimes things can only be fixed by installing newer versions of libraries which might break your own software.
- UNSTABLE just adds the newest version of every package to the list once they become available (and a developer has found time to compile it and fix some issues)
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.