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AT&T Chooses Ubuntu Linux Instead of Microsoft Windows (betanews.com)
An anonymous reader writes: one of the largest cellular providers is the venerable AT&T. While it sells many Linux-powered Android devices, it is now embracing the open source kernel in a new way. You see, the company has partnered with Canonical to utilize Ubuntu for cloud, network, and enterprise applications. That's right, AT&T did not choose Microsoft's Windows when exploring options. Canonical will provide continued engineering support too.
It's for hosting services, not for client use. In the cloud, the competition is pretty even between everything that isn't based on Mac OS. Why does this decision surprise anyone?
Heck, it's one of the reasons Azure supports *nix etc. in the first place.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
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To me it appears that Microsoft is no longer a trustworthy partner, in business or in the home.
... with that :) In two years: "AT&T choose Microsoft as its cloud, network, and enterprise applications provider"
AT&T will switch back to Windows once they see that the software they use is constantly forked by developers who can't get along, updates frequently remove and break features and other programs, and is poorly designed making it difficult to use. I understand AT&T experimenting with different options to replace legacy systems, but this will certainly be a short-lived experiment. The unprofessional nature of Linux, its poor quality and performance, and AT&T's need for reliable systems will doom this experiment to failure.
Going back to its roots in Unix,
Canonical just did what Red Hat & SUSE have been doing for the past 15 years... how is this news?
With what Microsoft has been doing in the consumer world with the Windows 10 installation nagging (~how many times do I have to tell Microsoft that I do not want to install Windows 10~) and the unwanted Windows 10 downloading, it is no surprise that AT&T is looking elsewhere for solutions.
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To me it appears that Microsoft is no longer a trustworthy partner, in business or in the home.
Umm, where have you been the past 30ish years?
Microsoft has NEVER been a "trusted partner" - "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run!" and all that.
venerable
ven()rb()l/
adjective
accorded a great deal of respect, especially because of age, wisdom, or character.
The company who's logo has been stylized into the death star? The company who just bought the remnants of fucking CarrierIQ? Are you shitting me? If anything this is negative press for Ubuntu.
Company adopts Linux for servers, is this news? Really?
AT&T Bell Labs invented Unix. Yeah, I know that's not quite the same AT&T as we see today (Bell Labs is part of Alcatel-Lucent-Nokia) but nonetheless today's AT&T is a direct descendant of the AT&T of the 1970s the developed Unix for it's own use. Heck, so they should be using Unix rather than Linux.. but they don't actually own it any more.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
Sincerely speaking, when I read the headline, I thought the choice was for the desktop.
Alas was I wrong!
Is there anyone else who thought the same?
Which major enterprise is using Linux on the desktop is I may ask?
If and when open Linux development becomes chaotic AT&T can fork and maintain its own distro. Imagine, AT&T maintaining its own version of *nix? ;-)
I bought a skylake based HP Envy 17t last week. There is no bloatware-free install of Windows 10 Pro provided by any means that I found (the "minimal image" install that previously appeared with HP laptops is gone, apparently). After de-crapping Window 10 as best I could I shrank a partition and installed Ubuntu 15.10.
The difference was like night and day. After a day and a half of coping with Windows 10 installing Ubuntu felt like a liberation; everything is vastly more responsive and direct. Nothing badgering you or behaving inconsistently. So few things have to be `fixed.' And none of it calling home to Microsoft. It's difficult to convey just how much better the machine feels running Linux.
Windows amplifies the cost of every operation so much you begin to believe there is something wrong with the hardware. Then you install Linux and discover you've actually bought an amazing machine.
birds of a feather flock together.. at&t and microsoft should be best buddies. both shit on their customers and customer data.
While it sells many Linux-powered Android devices
Linux hosted not Linux powered. Android users do not see Linux. The vast majority of Android developers do not even see Linux. The minority who jump through hoops to access Linux are pretty much just accessing POSIX calls so they don't really care about Linux either. Linux could be replaced with BSD and few would care or notice. Android is essentially its own operating system from both the user and developer perspective.
Wow! 2016 really is the year of Linux on the server stack!
Oh wait.....
Microsoft who has a pretty small market share of virtualization (though growing wildly fast) managed to lose a contract to Ubuntu who has even less of the virtualization market share.
It is clear that AT&T was choosing one of the two little dogs to run their system instead of VMware which... whether you choose Microsoft OR OpenStack just makes sense since VMware is great for little 2-20 server installations but is absolutely horrible when cloud comes in. Azure and OpenStack obviously make perfect sense in those areas.
So why OpenStack instead of Azure? More importantly, what idiot decided to do one or the other? AT&T is probably screwing themselves if they don't have a little of both.
(recently heard at a MS board meeting)
Allright, spill it, who dropped the ball and didn't invite the AT&T board to the golf resort?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well get the flock off my lawn... and the customers need to raise a little more hell if they want better treatment.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
A better headline might have been:
Canonical lands huge contract with AT&T
AT&T is a $200 billion organization, Canonical is about $10 billion. This deal might boost Canonical's revenue by 50%.
Also, it's a major credibility boost on Canonical's corporate resume. AT&T is a major, major company full of network experts, so it's a very significant endorsement of Canonical supporting large-scale applications. Consider Canonical trying to sell a new a customer, maybe Fisher Price or Nabisco:
Fisher Price: How do we have confidence that your team can support services at the scale Fisher Price needs?
Canonical rep: We run AT&T's systems, at the much larger scale they require.
> Canonical will provide continued engineering support too.
Looks like Canonical found its business model.
I use the KDE flavor of Mint.
Windows tried to change boot order.
Deleted apps I wanted to run in the background.
Updates whenever it wants usually when i need to response fast to something.
I rather pluck my own eyes out than run windows.
I used MS from DOS 1.1 without complaint.
But Canonical surely wouldn't introduce backdoors for a huge lucrative customer who has every three letter security agency in America balls deep inside them, would they?
After all they are from South Africa, a country known for it's long history of freedom and justice.
@perpenso: "Linux could be replaced with BSD and few would care or notice"
Android is the Linux kernel with a Java implementation running on top.
One amazingly huge shitpile of a company getting services and support from another amazingly huge shitpile of a company.
Seriously, we have on the one hand, AT&T, pass masters at stealing sensitive data from customers, selling it to whomever will buy it, and otherwise treating people like dirt. On the other hand, we have Canonical, also pass masters at snooping on everything its users do, and selling that information to whomever will buy it.
It truly is a match made in heaven.
Cos Slashdot tells me Ubuntu is crap.
That's what surprised me as well. Doesn't AT&T have any ownership of Unix anymore, or is it all gone to Lucent/USL/Bell Labs/SCO/Open Group/whatever? Also, GP mentioned that it's for hosting services, but for that, isn't it more of the establishment guys who are the real deal here - be it Red Hat, Suse, Debian, as opposed to Ubuntu? Looking at it any which way, AT&T made a strange decision, and the alternative was not Windows (Server), but something like either one of the old Unixes, like Solaris, or one of the established Linux distros, like Red Hat or Debian.
In telcos, Linux is the successor to Sun/Solaris. It's been happening for a while now, and it really sped up a lot when Oracle bought Sun. Windows was never a real option here.
I supposed the important difference is called 'Support'.
Linux has for many years proven itself as a great Kernel and with good support of the GNU stuff it makes a great OS.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
For such large enterprise environments, once they've picked something, they will generally be very careful not to have to change their minds that much. Maybe Red Hat could have a shot, but any further from Ubuntu would be a really tough sell.
Also, MS's ambitions are more bread and likely to conflict with AT&T goals. Canonical and SuSE are probably the two remotely viable companies that are the furthest from competing with AT&T in any conceivable way.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
SuSe and RH are the only real choices for enterprise Linux. Debian doesn't have an enterprise support system. Ubuntu doesn't have the manpower ( hence why they dominate in the free arena of small developers but once it comes to support the overwhelming choice is syse or RH...and oracle to some extent, but they've, apparently, been losing business in this area)
I don't think the current AT&T is the same as the former AT&T. The current one is a merger between Cingular and SBC I'm pretty sure.
M$ is a callback to its origin as a publisher of BASIC interpreters. In the line number era, before Dim ... As String, all string variables' names ended with a dollar sign.
10 LET M$ = "Microsoft"
20 PRINT M$;" introduces Windows"
30 END
GNU/Linux on servers and desktops has been so smooth since, let's be conservative, 2012
Servers yes. Desktops yes. Purpose-built laptops yes (source: System76). Random laptops not so much, as a lot of manufacturers of laptops that ship with Windows cut corners by using chipsets for which one or more of audio, WLAN, or suspend is unsupported on Linux.
Especially because GNU's Not UNIX. As far as I can tell, OS X is the only widely used desktop operating system to be certified as a UNIX® system.
Chrome OS by default is locked down not to run any app other than the Chrome web browser. If you put it in developer mode to install Crouton (a chroot with GNU and X11), it'll beg you every time it starts up to reenable operating system verification, which wipes the entire drive. Most other PC operating systems allow someone with physical access to wipe the drive but don't exactly encourage it. So you'd need to keep reinstallation media handy at all times and never save files to internal storage.
Now if the next step is Ubuntu on AT&T workstations that will be a huge change but hardly surprising should it be that it was the main reason AT&T went with Ubuntu in the first place. Many Internet companies will change as they baulk at the idea of M$ harvesting the networks for information free of charge and there will be more and more pressure to force out M$'s privacy invasion of the entire internet.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Canonical reported less than $70 million (not billion) in 2014.
Makes sense really, Even with Enterprise licensing, Microsoft gets expensive quick, $800 for server, etc... With the number of machines they are likely to be deploying its a HUGE savings. And the Linux systems tend to have better uptimes in my experience. I see "some" windows systems that need monthly or quarterly reboots yet have Linux and Solaris systems that have been up for over 400 days, and last reboot was only to update the kernel... Even other Service providers are using *nix on their backend service devices. Occasionally when Comcast is acting up and you connect to a cable channel or on demand it momentarily flashes the login screen for a Fedora system. (though making that "available" is silly)
venerable: "accorded a great deal of respect, especially because of age, wisdom, or character."
AT&T is not venerable.
True, Canonical's current revenue in no way justifies a $10 billion valuation. Talk of that kind of valuation is based on their growth potential. By revenue, the importance of the AT&T deal is even more significant- AT&T is a huge customer, for a company the size of Canonical.
$10B? Wtf are you talking about? They did $65M in revenue for 2013. You're saying they have a private valuation equivalent to a P/S of over 120?
Lol, no fucking way.
As if they won't benefit from that information eventually in ways they'll end up missing out on going with Ubuntu. I think you underestimate the willingness of people, even large corporations, to accept privacy invasion.
So long as Microsoft isn't actively pursuing corporate espionage, they won't give a shit.
The valuation isn't justified by their 2014/2015 revenue, but this one sale may have just doubled that revenue and more deals like it (and many smaller ones) are likely. So discussion is of a value somewhere in that general neighborhood. _I_ am not trying to buy 20% of Canonical for a billion dollars or so, but someone might, so I was generous in my comparison vs AT&T. (My point was how -small- Canonical is compared to AT&T, so I trade not to exaggerate how small they are.)
Windows 10 is in continual improvement and the reason you didn't want to install Windows 10 might no longer apply, so Microsoft is entitled to ask you again each time they add a feature or fix a bug in Windows 10.
Article makes no sense: They did not decide between Linux and MS. They decided which flavour of Linux or Unix to use.
.NET fail"), it is more expensive, eats much more resources, and Windows does scale badly (if you give it much more powerful Servers at one point it will no longer improve performance while Linux scales to huge systems (like thousands of CPUs super-computers))
They for sure did never even consider running a large infrastructure on Windows, because it makes no sense at all. They have many Unix/Linux applications they want to run...
Running a large Windows cloud does only make sense for MS, to prove that it would work. Why would anybody else? It is less stable (google "London Stock Exchange
[Example: on a i7 with Windows you can get 100k responses per second, while Linux gets 200k. Now take a 10 times more powerful Server (e.g. R720xd dual-Xeon), Linux gets 2M resps/sec, while Windows is at 100-120k resps/sec, it does not scale to the very powerful systems, it was not designed for that]
It doesn't have separate OS and data storage?
The 1980's called, and want their "stick everything on C:\" strategy back.
Sorry for the (partially) offtopic reply, but I just saw your question about Trusted Network Connect here.
I haven't been hearing much new news about Trusted Computing or Trusted Network Connect recently. Ordinarily I'd consider that a good sign that it wasn't moving forwards, however it's looking more like a successful slow-quiet-rollout strategy. Both Microsoft and Google make the Trust chip mandatory on phones, and Microsoft has declared that it's mandatory on all desktops and other devices in a few months. all new devices and computers must implement TPM 2.0 and ship with TPM support enabled , starting one year after the Win10 release. (Apparently August of this year.) The whole design of Win10 is to force rolling updates. It could get ugly if Microsoft simply pushes out all sorts of Trusted Computing crap as non-declinable "routine updates".
The phone lockdowns are definitely leading the way. Microsoft says phone manufacturers must prohibit users from turning off secureboot, and it looks like Google is also enforcing enforcing secure boot which (so far) permitting you to then drop to an eternal-nag non-Trusted mode. Sigh. Not good. I wouldn't be surprised if desktops also use a transition step of enforcing an eternal-nag-mode if you try to opt-out of Trusted Computing. At some point support can simply be ended for the nag-mode option. Then there's no opt-out at all.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Every single time they patch the OS, roughly 8 times a week
With what Microsoft has been doing in the consumer world with the Windows 10 installation nagging (~how many times do I have to tell Microsoft that I do not want to install Windows 10~) and the unwanted Windows 10 downloading, it is no surprise that AT&T is looking elsewhere for solutions.
Yeah some consumer OS issue which doesn't affect the scenario is what drove a mega corporation who can't give a shit about consumers to ditch another mega corporation's cloud service.
More likely scenario: Azure was more expensive. And it IS more expensive.
It doesn't have separate OS and data storage?
Even if it did, the data storage is encrypted, and the master key for the volume changes when the device is switched between developer mode and not-developer mode.
⦠so long as you don't want a compressing filesystem, or mind the system locking up if a disk goes bad.
When The Bell System split up in the 1980s, AT&T got to keep Unix and most of the Labs, and the 7 Baby Bells owned most of the Bell telcos.
When AT&T split up into AT&T, Lucent, and NCR back in the 1990s, Lucent got most of Bell Labs, including ownership of Unix.
SBC (aka Southwestern Bell, the Texas Baby Bell branch) in the late 2000s and early 2010s bought Pacific Bell, Southern Bell, Ameritech, old-AT&T, and renamed itself AT&T because that had more brand value than SBC. The wireless businesses that were variously named Cingular and Cellular One and AT&T Wireless had their own complicated sets of ownership changes, but effectively SBC bought them. (Pacific Bell sometimes owned half of them, sometimes old-AT&T did, sometimes both, sometimes you really needed to know whether you had an "orange" or "blue" wireless service from the same company, etc.)
(Disclaimer: This is my own interpretation, not the official position of AT&T, many pieces of which I've worked for over the last few decades.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Remember that this announcement is about Cloud Stuff - no matter what client operating systems you're using, the host environment is almost certainly either controlled by VMware or OpenStack or Amazon or Azure, and the servers are almost certainly Intel-ish CPUs running VMware ESXi or KVM (on some Linux platform) or maybe Windows Hyper-V. There are some exceptions (Docker's busy disrupting and overlapping with that space, and there's a bit of Xen left, and some switching/routing platforms like ODL or *NFV* things), and there are a lot of players trying to provide management and operations services, bare-metal-as-a-service provisioning where that makes sense, bare-metal-as-a-server-setup-method provisioning, etc.
A year or two ago, the field looked a bit simpler - either you ran VMware (with a high software price tag on every CPU or server, and services that worked, with mature support systems), or OpenStack (Free! With lots of services that didn't work yet, documentation you were free to write yourself and donate to the community, and an ecosystem of vendors whose products actually worked on VMware and were going to be working on OpenStack Real Soon Now. And Free!) It's a lot messier today, and lots more things actually work.
(Disclaimer: I work for AT&T, but this is purely my personal commentary on the industry, not company statements, and AT&T is such a big company that for any well-known technology we've probably got two or three different groups using it and a dozen more who've evaluated it and have much better informed opinions than I do.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
(Disclaimer: I work for AT&T, but this is just my personal opinion, not an official corporate position.)
This announcement is about infrastructure for some of AT&T's cloud services; it's really separate from anything about laptop or consumer OS's. Basically everything in the world that used to run on servers seems to be migrating to cloud-type architectures, and I couldn't tell from the article which part of the business this was about (AT&T runs a wide range of cloud and hosting services for customers, some public, some custom, plus a lot of internal computing services for corporate functions, or it could be a corporate support deal of some kind as opposed to a specific set of systems.)
My work laptop, managed by the desktop support IT department, runs some professional-license version of Win7-64, and they manage what updates get shipped and when, so I don't get nagged about Win10. They also manage hosted virtual desktops, so people who want the Win7 environment for corporate apps and Outlook mail can have that running on top of whatever other OS (Mac, Linux, iPad, and older Windows hardware are all fairly popular for that.) (I also have VMware Player on the Windows machine, with a few different Linux guests on top when I need them.) My development machines mostly run Ubuntu, either on bare metal or with ESXi or OpenStack underneath; other popular environments I run into include CentOS and licensed RedHat.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I don't think the current AT&T is the same as the former AT&T. The current one is a merger between Cingular and SBC I'm pretty sure.
No its the same beast. Remember Cingular and SBC were part of ATT before the big split. ATT is like some beast out of a horror film you hack it up and then all the pieces come back together to rise up again.
The spy network needed ATT to come back together again it is easier dealing with one big company that you have in your back pocket and dealing with a bunch of smaller ones that might not play ball when you want to wire tap. Ask the old CEO of Quest about that.
"You see", S/one ate too many beans -;)