Linux, the overweight king of cloud: Will this change anytime soon?

Grazed from TechRepublic. Author: Nick Hardiman.

Sadly, Linux has become old, fat, and slow. After two decades of overindulgence, the once-lean OS has gained some ugly pounds of cruft. Linux may not be the most overweight server OS out there, but it does take up more resources than it used to. According to the Linux Foundation’s 2014 Enterprise End User Report, 75% of enterprise cloud platforms are Linux.

Since millions of cloud computing services are powered by Linux, that’s a lot of extra resources consumed. Do we really need to use an all-singing OS like Linux — one that requires an overloaded kernel and thousands of supporting files? Isn’t there a lighter, faster, and more secure way of providing business value?…

The Linux Swiss army knife

Linux server distributions such as Ubuntu Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise are multi-purpose Swiss army knives. It’s the flexibility of these Linux distros that make them the best choice for many cloud computing jobs. Making Linux flexible is also what’s making it so fat…

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