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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.
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
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.