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."

Comments

huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck is a "Cloud OS"?

Fuck marketingspeak forever.

no surprise, what people use at home they use ther

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re: Centos = RHEL really

[fluffernutter]

If they are the same thing then why must one be licensed but not the other?

What makes Ubuntu Server unsuitable?

[tepples]

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?

Re:What makes Ubuntu Server unsuitable?

[chmod a x mojo]

I can:

I would ( and do ) use Debian STABLE for servers. I would NOT use Debian UNSTABLE or TESTING on anything other than a test server. Ubuntu is based on snapshots of Debian UNSTABLE that Ubuntu devs try to bug fix. Like all bugfixing, introduction of more and new bugs is inevitable, and to date the quality control track record in Ubuntu hasn't been near as reliable as Debians stringent rules for UNSTABLE > TESTING > STABLE migration. Probably because of Debian being upstream and having more Dev manpower, as well as Ubuntu deciding to release every six months no matter what. This is fine for a DESKTOP, where newer kernel and hardware support may be needed, but isn't a very good idea for servers.

As far as I know, even the LTS versions of Ubuntu are based on snapshots of TESTING. Still not something I would want to run on any servers that uptime is critical on.

Re:Centos = RHEL really

[thule]

40% ain't bad for CentOS/RHEL. I'm a bit surprised that Debian, which Ubuntu is based on, has fallen so far.

Ubuntu is a fine distro, I just don't like the company and the leadership. RHEL is a fine distro, but it purposely has a slower update cadence. I love the RedHat company and how committed they are to OSS. Everything they buy (and they've spent a lot on acquisitions over the years), they open source.

Re:no surprise, what people use at home they use t

[Junta]

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.

Re:Ubuntu _is_ primarily a desktop OS...

[FatdogHaiku]

So what you're saying is that this is the year of Linux on the desktop... in the cloud?

So... "Cloudtop"?

Re:Important Takeaway

[lorinc]

At the lab, we replaced centos on our cluster with ubuntu, and almost none of my colleagues are running ubuntu on their laptop (I'm running debian - if that counts). The motivation was that gcc was so fucking old it didn't had half the C++11 functionalities we're using. We could have gone for debian testing or sid, but it's not something you want to do on a cluster that's going to run month long simulations...

Frankly, I think ubuntu server is the best choice today if you need a compromise between stability and bleeding edge. That probably more why it has all the market.