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

Ubuntu _is_ primarily a desktop OS...

[gweihir]

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.

Re:Ubuntu _is_ primarily a desktop OS...

[rossz]

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.

Centos = RHEL really

[Kludge]

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?

Re: Centos = RHEL really

[thule]

Because RHEL has direct support from RedHat and CentOS has community support. Since the src.rpm's are the same for RedHat and CentOS (minus the trademark graphics), I'm comfortable calling CentOS a clone of RHEL.

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?

[thule]

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.

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

[quantaman]

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.

Goodbye Redhat, keep making the same mistake..

[goruka]

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.