Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
And the author of the article can't.
"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."
There are 220,700 instances accounted for, and Ubuntu has a 61% share among those. As other smaller OSs are accounted for, the Ubuntu share only decreases. In other words, it's plainly NOT twice as popular as the rest put together. If I can make as assumption, I think he probably meant that it was "as popular as all others put together." That seems closer to reality.
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.