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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.
Dont know how to delete their instances :)
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...
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.
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.