Linux rules the Clouds | Hacker News Reader

Linux rules the Clouds

zdnet.com

26 pointsGarbage15 comments

RHEL (and SUSE, to some degree) is popular with two crowds - Enterprise Software Vendors who need to have a platform that they claim is "Supported", and anyone trying to run that software. Particularly Oracle and the like. These people typically spend money like it's water, so they're great customers and make Redhat lots of money.

Centos used to be wildly popular as the "Free" substitute for RHEL, but, back around 2009 or so, where Ubuntu actually started to get a reputation for (A) reliable releases (B) rock solid apt-gt support, (C) a whiff of an "Enterprise" backing it (D) Canonical Support, and (E) lots of AMIs floating around (I see 22 for RHEL, 1053 for Ubuntu) - it picked up inertia on AWS. Particular for the crowd that is keen on the .deb linux derivatives.

It sort of feeds on itself - Ubuntu is popular as an EC2 platform, means people become familiar with it, means it becomes more popular.

You're also just about forced to use RHEL if you're a customer of Rackspace's managed hosting. My life would have been quite a bit simpler on Ubuntu with Postrgres - RHEL and MySQL have led to at least one problem each - but Rackspace only supports MySQL on RHEL. Or at least, that was the case 15 months ago when I signed up with them.

It probably doesn't help RHEL that it's too slow-moving to leap into the cloud with the speed that Ubuntu had (in terms of packaged tools and such), and that the people who run RHEL already have a mess of servers of their own.

This is all rather amusing considering Amazon's EC2 machines are probably all running RHEL.

Red Hat is for enterprise solutions and is not for toy startups. RHEL 2.1 still rocks the business world and is a great operating system.

"I would have guessed the leading operating system on the top cloud platform would have been Red Hat and its close relatives, CentOS, Oracle Enterprise Linux, and Fedora."

So all the surprise he is expressing has nothing to do with Linux ruling the clouds, just which distro of Linux, so why did he pick that title?

"Today, December 20th, Ubuntu is running 4,840 instances on EC2, followed by CentOS, with 1,250, Fedora with 313; Oracle with 80; and Red Hat with a mere 73 instances."

Only ~6500 instances up and running on EC2 today? That seems to me to be too low by at least a couple orders of magnitude.

Edit: Their cited source (http://thecloudmarket.com/stats) is a catalog of images, which makes a lot more sense.

Only ~6500 instances up and running on EC2 today? That seems to me to be too low by at least a couple orders of magnitude.

Yes, it's utter nonsense. The EC2 instance-count is in the millions, not thousands. The author just doesn't know the difference between instance and image.

I guess the popularity of Ubuntu on the cloud has to do with their success on the desktop.

Also, they seem to support the cloud pretty well coming out with ec2 versions and they integrated system tools for creating virtual machines.

Since when amazon started publishing this information?

It doesn't. The author is simply wholly ignorant of any and all facts. This is ZDnet after all. He also attempts to directly compare Azure to Ubuntu, which is simply a basic category error.

Dear CBS, owner of ZDnet: I can churn out ill-informed garbage too, probably at a higher WPM than this guy, and I am willing to work for 75% of whatever you're paying him. I can be contacted via the URL in my profile. Thanks.

He got the information from The Cloud Market and they outline their process here:

http://blog.thecloudmarket.com/post/208291539/where-do-we-ge...

This will have a number of factors, but some key ones for me:

Brand recognition. Ubunutu is big, when I needed a linux VM distro guess what I chose? When I bought a linode, guess what I chose?

Popularity of the cloud/servers. More people are running servers these days for various things. EC2 and cheap VPS are making a lot more people interested in a free, powerful and stable OS that will run their server with minimum hassle and maximum ability to find articles on google.

Ease. Ubuntu has great docs, lots of easy to understand tutorials and easy package management.

There are others, but this is it for me. Ubunutu is so much win.

How, on earth, did this get 20 upvotes?

As others have pointed out the author clearly doesn't have a remote clue what he is talking about.

When you don't know the difference between an EC2 instance and an EC2 image then please refrain from writing articles about cloud providers...

Good to see I wasn't the only person who thought the author was crazy when reading that article.

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