Yeah I wondered about Ubuntu Cloud although for some reason I thought it had to be run through Ubuntu so I didn't include it.
The company I work for tends to like Microsoft (hey, I just work here)
But because of this, we use Azure as our cloud platform. The "default" Linux in Azure is Ubuntu LTS.
Because of the Microsoft/Ubuntu relationship.
You can pick other distro's if you want to. There are about 8 or so "standard" distro's. But You can install almost any flavor you want if you go out to the Microsoft marketplace. Microsoft charges a little more for some of the others. Well... let me explain. Linux is "free" (so they say)
But if I create an Ubuntu virtual machine in the Azure cloud with a certain number of resources.
Number of CPUs = X, Amount of RAM = Y, Hard drive size= Z.
I get charged a certain amount per month for this.
However if I create, say a OpenSuSE, CentOS, or Fedora virtual machine with the same exact resources.
Number of CPUs = X, Amount of RAM = Y, Hard drive size= Z.
I get charged a different amount.
Now supposedly I am getting charged for the resources, not the Linux, but it's interesting different flavors have different prices.
The day 2 of Microsoft Build 2016 came as a shock to the world when Microsoft announced that it has bought Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu Linux, and shut down Ubuntu Linux forever.
fossbytes.com
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Typical Microsoft marketing. Years ago I worked at small PC clone shop. We built our own "no-name" PCs and pre-installed software on them. We started putting slackware on some of them, and Microsoft told us, cease and desist or we will take your Microsoft distributor license away.
So then it was "Windows only". Then less than a year later, Microsoft came back and said "You have to install MS office as part of the package, or we'll take your license away". Of course we had to raise our prices accordingly. We went out of business shortly after that.
By the way, Redhat is owned by IBM/Lenovo, which is now headquartered in China.
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On a related "conspiracy theory" note....
Around the same time frame, the company I went to work for after this, started using Linux.
Microsoft started charging per CPU for Windows server. Then if you ran SQL server, this was also charged by CPU. I remember we had some servers we were paying over $20,000 (US) a year
in licenses... "PER SERVER"!! That gets expensive fast.
Linux was free... well.... for a while. We eventually started using Redhat (not free)
But even though Redhat was expensive, it was still less than 1/4th the cost of MS Server.
and they didn't care how many CPUs we had. They didn't charge extra for running a database.
(But for some unknown reason, we started using Oracle DB, and here we go again, more about that later)
Microsoft started to see a shift in the server market, more and more people were using Linux.
Enter the secure boot, SHIM-OS. Microsoft was forcing server manufacturers to make their servers run only Windows. IBM, Gateway, Dell, HP, all the big boys had to play along for a while.
There was a short period of time when you could not run Linux on name brand servers.
Enter Sequent, Asus, Acer, SuperMicro, and other smaller independent server manufacturers. Companies started buying from these guys for two reasons, they were cheaper, and you could run Linux on them.
About that same time, there was a huge shift towards Linux. The writing was on the wall so to speak.
(Right now MS Windows is less than 5% of the total server market, Linux is about 80%, UNIX and other OS's make up the difference)
So the big server manufacturers saw their revenue disappearing, while the small manufacturers were getting rich. They wanted to tell Microsoft to take a hike, but they were locked into secure boot by legal agreements. Some of them such as Gateway went broke during this time and were bought out by other companies. So they made something called a signed shim, basically a secure boot key that get read by the BIOS/UEFI. Long as you have that you are good to go. This had to be licensed from Microsoft, but it could be installed on Linux (and is to this very day, if you pay the license fee)
Microsoft may be embracing Linux now.. but it wasn't always that way.