“Microsoft loves Linux” - what does it mean to you and your client ?

Microsoft loves Linux - yes you read it right. Once Linux was compared with Cancer by MS, but the scenario has totally changed. Now they are kind of in a romantic relationship. If you have followed some recent announcements by MS in Satya Naddela era they are really focused on making things open source, making things cross platform, building things Cloud and Mobile first. With a  intent of opening up new frontier to the open source community.

 Couple of years ago we got .NET Core, a lean .NET framework to build cross platform applications targeting Windows, Linux and MacOS. Which enables us mordenising the application in the era of Client side heavy, contenerised applications built for cloud and all.

Recently MS has announed SQL Server 2017 for Linux. Yes, they made it like what Oracle is doing for many years. At the same time this not to kill open source databases like MySQL, PostGree etc. This is to tap into the market where there are players already exists and and firms are heavily in Linux eco system.

Having said all of these how is it going to affect you and your clients?
As a consultant of Microsoft stack development, I was asked many times for a new client Implementation to choose right tools and Technology platform for their web solution. As an obvious choice  ASP.NET with SQL Server was the key candidate to infuse all goodness of MS. Now when giving a ball park estimate to the clients about the Server OS and Database software, it was most of the time found that it was overshooting the clients budget. I am talking about mid size clients here, or the clients already having Linux eco system in place. Who doesn’t want to spend money for Windows servers. One of the other key reason for overshooting budget was - Windows server licensing costs a ton.

Now that MS supports Linux, can we think of using Linux infra and save some bucks ? Answer is “sure why not”. Well although  Linux is free and open source distribution but it’s not completely free. Industry leading Linux distributions like Read Hat or Ubuntu charges for support. And for sure customers won’t go for production without the Support from the OS vendor. So you have to purchase support. Still you are going to save money for your client. Wondering how much ? It was found in many studies that total cost of ownership (TCO) of Linux is 34% lesser that Windows.
So you got it right, let’s build the web application in ASP.NET core and deploy it in Linux web server   either in Apache or in Ngnex. Purchase a copy of SQL Server 2017 for Linux and setup your Linux SQL server database and you are good to go. Also if your clients are running their shop in Amazon cloud, now Amazon cloud also supports SQL server 2017 running on Redhat.
Eventually all other cloud provider and shared hosting provider will start supporting this and come up with competitive pricing model. It’s just the beginning.

I am gonna come up with some more details in my next post on pricing and stats on how much your client can save by moving to Linux infra. Also I am going to some examples on how to built ASP.NET core app targeted for Linux and deploy.

Reference:
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/how-red-hat-enterprise-linux-trims-total-cost-of-ownership-in-comparison-to-windows-server
https://www.ephesoft.com/lowering-total-cost-of-ownership-through-linux/
https://static.lwn.net/images/pdf/cybersource-tco-study.pdf