When you think of Ubuntu Linux, what do you think of? I would guess you think about the Linux desktop. While Ubuntu is certainly a big player—maybe the biggest—when it comes to the Linux desktop, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu wants you to know that “A remarkable thing happened this year: companies started adopting Ubuntu over RHEL for large-scale enterprise workloads, in droves.”
Since last summer, Ubuntu has been more popular than Red Hat as a Web server.
Shuttleworth makes this claim because, according to W3Tech, which surveys technologies used on the Web, shows that since July 2011 Ubuntu has overtaken Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for Web servers. According to W3Techs, as of February, “Ubuntu s now used on 6% of all Web servers, up from 4% one year ago.”
Now Cloud Market is measuring Amazon Machine Image (AMI), a pre-configured operating system and virtual application software which is used to create a virtual machine, not the number of running systems. As Shuttleworth told me during our e-mail discussion of Cloud Market’s data “I would characterize it as an easily gamed measure of innovation (i.e. a measure that will become less useful if lots of people start talking about it :-) rather than a measure of adoption. It’s a measure of how many people have taken the OS and done their own snapshot with their own customizations, not a measure of how many of each of those images is running.” Since, however, no one to my knowledge has been looking at Cloud Market’s data in this way it strikes me as still showing serious business server interest in Ubuntu.
Ubuntu images are by far the most popular operating system images on the Amazon cloud.
Source : http://www.zdnet.com
