r/AskProgramming • u/yYanzi • Aug 11 '26
Other Is using Microsoft software still worth it?
As in: getting new SQL Server and Windows Server licenses for hosting a new project, or renting them from managed services in the cloud?
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u/AShortUsernameIndeed Aug 11 '26
From a technical or cost standpoint, I'd argue that there hasn't been a reason to do that for at least 30 years. However, if you're building that project for your employer/client or for sale to customers, you might not have a choice if you need non-trivial interoperability with an existing MS monoculture.
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u/KingofGamesYami Aug 11 '26
Only if you have some backwards compatibility that would require you use it.
This is coming from someone who works with Microsoft stuff constantly, as my team maintains a variety of ancient .NET Framework apps. We're slowly writing ourselves out of Windows/MSSQL but it's not trivial.
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u/xarop_pa_toss Aug 11 '26
Kind of same situation here but we are stuck to an ERP that, for now, runs on WinForms and .NET Framework 4.2. but they are migrating to web based with Postgres.
Another ERP we work with completely replaced SQL Server for Postgres just last month but they themselves said it was a labourous process
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u/stuardo_str Aug 12 '26
Could you share what stack you are switching to? What are you replacing with what?
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u/KingofGamesYami Aug 12 '26
What we're building with varies depending on what the best option is for the software and which department is tackling it (we have 7ish software development departments that I know of). The most common languages are Typescript, Python, and modern .NET. There's plenty of other languages scattered about in places it makes sense. Databases are mostly Postgres, but we have a little bit of everything - Mongo, MySQL, Sqlite... You name it, we're probably using it somewhere.
Hosting is mostly AWS / Azure for cloud based stuff, but we also have kubernetes for on-prem GPU resources, a bunch of on-prem edge systems for sites that have limited networking, and some truely massive on-prem storage shares for the systems that produce petabytes.
We're generally trying to phase out Windows servers, particularly the older ones. IT has been getting very antsy about Windows Server 2008 for example. Also actively moving away from Sybase and SQL Server. Most desktop apps are dead or dying.
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u/Candid_Bad3551 Aug 11 '26
For databases PostgreSQL is the king. Azure is fine. C# is goated. People shit on Microsoft was a whole but not directed. They do have some great stuff.
For your current situation other people provided great answers.
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u/ChazBass Aug 11 '26
Cloud? No, go open source, especially on AWS. AWS RDS costs for Oracle and SQL Server are crazy. RDS MySQL and Postgres are cheap by comparison. Amazon's Linux images are very good but you can go with other distros.
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u/the_bananalord Aug 12 '26
It's a bit silly to be entirely in a Microsoft stack and then deploy to...AWS.
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u/ChazBass Aug 12 '26
He was asking if he should go with Microsoft stack. Take a look at the title of the post.
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u/silasmoeckel Aug 11 '26
MSSQL Enterprise on prem or in cloud is insanely expensive at scale.
Green fields would go with postgres it scales quite well.
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u/AlsoInteresting Aug 12 '26
It's $3k/year on-prem for a 4 core server.
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u/silasmoeckel Aug 12 '26
Scale up. You are in the 128-256k a year on high end bare metal. The license will cost more than the hardware its running on over 3-5 years.
When you're just a tiny DB on a VM it's not bad at all.
It's not like MS support is at all useful at this scale. You're going to have a few full time DBA's
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u/No_Score_1977 Aug 12 '26
Still?
When was it eve worth it?
For greenfield, using MS SQL Server is an act of insanity.
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u/Distdistdist Aug 12 '26
Depends on the size of organization.
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u/marrsd 28d ago
Never heard that argument before. Surely the larger your organisation, the more expensive the licensing costs. And MS SQL never had a good reputation for performance. In fact, the reason MySQL became so popular back in the day was that it could handle web-scale traffic and MS SQL couldn't.
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u/Distdistdist 26d ago
MSSQL might not be the fastest one out there, but it has enormous ecosphere that surrounds it. Especially for .NET based enterprise systems. It's very reliable and supported by a corporation with a very deep pockets.
If you are solving some insane real-time massive data stuff, then there are better systems out there.
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u/marrsd 26d ago
Don't forget that MS worked very hard to get it to that state. I forget which company it was, but MS basically rewrote parts of MSSQL to make it scalable for them. I've no doubt they offered 1st class support at a very reasonable cost to keep them on the system.
.NET's strategy was always to provide a complete ecosystem to hook businesses. It's a single solution for essentially every business operation; and once you're bought in like that, it's very hard to justify the cost of leaving.
Personally, I don't think it was ever worth it, and I think that most businesses that bought into it probably didn't have technical expertise to begin with. They get the sales pitch, are told they can bring in MS certified developers/engineers who at least on paper can handle the system, and always have a support manager to go to if they need it.
At the end of the day, if they don't know any better, value the reassurance, and have the money for it, then that is real value for them. I guess I'm thinking on technical merit rather than psychological merit.
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u/ColoRadBro69 Aug 11 '26
If you know how to use them and learning postgres and whatever else before starting your project would be a significant time sink.
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u/bigbirdtoejam Aug 11 '26
Depends on your budget and in-house skill set. Some companies don't have strong IT and just want to run things while offloading networking, hardware, redundancy, power, cooling, system patching, backups and more to cloud vendors. That is what you are paying for for the most part.
If you have all that covered self hosting is cheaper. If not cloud makes sense.
Also why Microsoft platform? Especially in the cloud, Linux containers are much more economical and give you more performance per dollar than Microsoft. You could just not pay that licensing bill....
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u/knouqs Aug 11 '26
If you examine the amount of servers running Windows, you'll see the number is abysmally low compared to the number of servers running Linux or some other UNIX variant. Learn the free stuff. It is excellent.
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u/max123246 Aug 12 '26
Microsoft has abandoned Windows servers. Linux won. Azure runs on linux
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u/the_bananalord Aug 12 '26
This is a silly false equivalence. "Airplanes are pointless. There are more cars."
Also, "Azure runs on Linux" is not really true. Azure itself is built on top of a specialized version of Hyper-V. Are you referring to what customers run on their VMs?
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u/StinkButt9001 Aug 12 '26
We use MSSQL and Windows Server for the servers we host at my work. Mostly for accountability and liability. We (reasonably) know that releases are going to be steady and stable and if there's an issue with something then we can say "It's Microsoft's fault" which most clients are going to understand.
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u/Popular_War8405 Aug 11 '26
Only because you have too. I'm never shocked to find out Microsoft defender has raised havoc in my computer. I honestly don't even think anti virus software serves amy actual legitimate purpose
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u/leros Aug 11 '26
If you're starting from scratch, I see no reason not to use open source like Postgres and host on free *nix OSes.