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Ubuntu Linux Continues To Dominate OpenStack and Other Clouds (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: One reason Ubuntu is increasing its lead is that Jujo, Canonical's application modeling and deployment DevOps tool, has been gaining in popularity. In the latest OpenStack user survey, we see that OpenStack is finally gaining real momentum in private clouds. We also see that Ubuntu Linux is continuing to dominate OpenStack. As Canonical cloud marketing manager Bill Bauman said, "Ubuntu OpenStack continues to dominate the majority of deployments with 55 percent of production OpenStack clouds. The previous survey showed Ubuntu OpenStack at 33 percent of production clouds. Ubuntu has seen almost 67 percent growth in an area where Ubuntu was already the market leader. These numbers are a huge testament to the community support Ubuntu OpenStack receives every day." The Cloud Market's latest analysis of operating systems on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) shows Ubuntu with just over 215,000 instances. Ubuntu is followed by Amazon's own Amazon Linux Amazon Machine Image (AMI), with 86,000 instances. Further back, you'll find Windows with 26,000 instances. In fourth and fifth place, respectively, you'll find Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with 16,500 instances and then CentOS with 12,500 instances.
Looks like I have to type more than that so the code knows I really mean:
sed -e 's,jujo/juju,g'
Just don't neglect the desktop. It's getting there.
Dont know how to delete their instances :)
Neckbeards yell at clouds.
The more important news is that EC2 is ~ 341,000 Linux installs to MS-Windows' puny 26,000. Linux is 1,312% more popular! No wonder Microsoft wants to somehow incorporate Linuxy and Linuxish in MS-Windows...
Is EC2 really only ~370,000 instances overall? That seems off by several orders of magnitude...
I think Linux makes much more sense as a general cloud OS run in VMs, especially if your applications are written in portable C, C++, or Java. Microsoft's advantage on the desktop has always been its strong ecosystem. Their servers work well for corporate environments, largely because they interop with and manage their desktop systems pretty well.
However, for the cloud, that legacy ecosystem doesn't really exist yet, so everyone is starting more or less on equal footing. And most of the major services allow you to manage your instances the same way, regardless of the OS running in the VM. So, why not use the zero-cost open source solution, all other factors being equal? So, yeah, the numbers don't really surprise me.
Before you gloat too much, however, remember that which OS is being used for cloud services is no longer of any strategic importance to Microsoft. They're making money with their cloud services regardless of whether people are running Windows or Linux. This also explains why they're suddenly keen to embrace cross-platform and Linux development, which seems to have a lot of Linux devotees confused/suspicious - but it makes perfect sense if you look at it from this perspective.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
This is how I usually choose EC2 instances:
1) Amazon Linux if I want everything safe, standard, compatible and as well supported as possible.
2) Ubuntu if I want what I am most familiar with and the latest versions of stufff and don't expect the application to run for more than four years.
3) Redhat/CentOS if I don't want to do a major OS upgrade for ten years.
4) Windows. If I discover that hell has frozen over. Only joking! I do use it occasionally for end-user remote desktops and stuff.
The problem for Ubuntu users and others is the confusing use of the "Ubuntu" project name to also denote the default GUI desktop flavour, the "ubuntu-desktop" virtual package-name, or the installer ISO name.
This article is talking about Ubuntu as guest in virtual machines where the install images are generally from the ubuntu-cloud [1], Canonical partner-images [2] or ubuntu-server ISOs [3].
Ubuntu GUI users are probably only familiar with the GUI flavour names, as in:
$ apt-cache search -n '.*buntu-desktop'
ubuntu-desktop - The Ubuntu desktop system
mythbuntu-desktop - The Mythbuntu standalone system
edubuntu-desktop - educational desktop for Ubuntu
kubuntu-desktop - Kubuntu Plasma Desktop/Netbook system
lubuntu-desktop - Lubuntu Desktop environment
...
xubuntu-desktop - Xubuntu desktop system
[1] https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/
[2] https://partner-images.canonical.com/core/xenial/
[3] http://cdimages.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-server/
I wonder more if this doesn't indicate that a lot of people deploying these are relatively new to computing.
I don't know anyone who runs anything serious on Ubuntu - however those who have only just started playing with computing seems to gravitate towards Ubuntu.
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
>"Is EC2 really only ~370,000 instances overall? That seems off by several orders of magnitude..."
I thought so too. But those are the numbers from the site. They don't say what criteria is being used.
AKA Ubuntu Server :) That being said, they do polish it up very nicely. Debian dragging their feet on PPA support certainly doesn't help IMO.
You're aware they're counting OpenStack deployments and Amazon EC2 VM instances, right? Those are not systems or services typically used by those "relatively new to computing." And that you seem to be dismissing Ubuntu as a toy OS speaks more to your ignorance of their full product lineup than anything else.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.