Who cares? Because I assure you, Microsoft doesn’t.
20-25% of those webservers are running on Microsoft Azure hardware. Microsoft is the #2 cloud provider and has been slowly but closing their gap behind AWS in recent years. All of that is in large part due to them embracing Linux and open source support on their platform.
Software isn’t the battleground, and hasn’t been for a decade. The people behind Apache and Nginx aren’t making bank on their web server dominance. Microsoft and AWS still rake in money hand over fist regardless of what software runs on their servers.
The author of this article’s apparent attitude that this is some kind of indicator of Microsoft’s market failure is one of the most ridiculous conclusions I’ve heard in a while.
I never understood how they had any in the first place.
I remember trying to setup a web server in IIS in the 90s and it was one of the reasons why now I am a full time Linux engineer.
Non-MS Web servers and services have evolved significantly since IIS was originally introduced. Back in the mid 90s when the web was growing up authentication was significantly more primitive. Active Directory didn’t exist yet. OpenSSL didn’t even exist. Linux as an accepted business server was much more rare. Your options for OS were Windows, IBM (AS400 or AIX), SCO Unix, Netware, AT&T or Berkley Unix, and a few others mainframe OSes.
Among other things, IIS allowed a way to leverage existing user directories for auth on top of an OS you already had deployed and supported in your org. It was a simple, primitive, horrible insecure and exciting time.
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Dude, I learned how to write HTML in the 90’s and even back then everyone knew that apache2 was clearly fucking superior. IIS has been a joke since the 90’s when it was released.
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Because people already had a server to run Exchange, which is actually pretty good, and if you’re already paying a fortune for Windows, why not use it?
Linux is definitely not free, you need to hire staff who know how it works and you probably also need to pay a support contract for someone even more qualified where necessary (e.g. Red Hat, who can patch the kernel if that’s what it takes to fix your problem).
Since you’re already paying for both of those with your Exchange server, it was cheaper to use IIS as well. These days Linux is a lot lower maintenance and support contracts are cheaper, so it’s less of a concern.
I wonder if they still even teach windows server in school these days. Back in my days 10ish years ago we had separate courses for windows server and Linux. But when I got a job all the windows server was doing was AD and now even that is either gone or on it’s way out.
Can confirm that Windows Server is taught in school IT programs, and can confirm that Windows Server is still being used for both Active Directory and on-premises virtualization (Hyper-V). I interned at a large international organization with networks on 6 continents and it was moving its server infrastructure back to its own datacenters because of rising costs of cloud hosting. It used Hyper-V on Windows Server to host every thing.
Isn’t Cloudflare just a proxy?
Cloudflare, like Akamai and others, provides a number of services that include proxying, CDN, web security (WAF), bot detection & protection, image optimization, and more.
Cloud providers like AWS, Google, and MS provide similar services as well, but typically to a lesser extent. I’ve worked with Akamai, Cloudflare, and AWS, and find Akamai’s to be the most powerful/flexible/customizable.
And yet, half of my website is hosted on Azure Storage. That little unsolicited remark about Microsoft’s valuation at the bottom is clearly the result of smoking too much copium by the biased author.
