Microsoft puts its money where its software is and runs a portion of its business on a product not even in final release.
At Microsoft, they like to say they eat their own dog food. That is to say they run the company on the software they make, often long before the rest of us. Such is the case with its Bing search engine, which is now running on the Release Candidate of Windows Server 2012.
Microsoft delivered the Release Candidate (RC) of Windows Server 2012 on May 31 for final testing, which was at that point feature-complete. They might modify things a little, but by and large, it’s cooked.
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As a show of faith, and proof, the company announced on June 7 that the release candidate for Windows Server 2012, not the final code, is serving up all worldwide results from Bing.com.
In a post to the Windows Server blog on June 7, Mukul Sabharwal, a software development engineer on the Bing team, said that Bing is deploying Windows Server 2012 “as fast as they can” because the Server 2012 is solid and offers so much for cloud-optimized on-premises functions.
Sabharwal cited the.NET Framework 4.5 with background garbage collection and associated improved latencies, new multicore JIT (Just-in-Time) functionality in .NET 4.5, the ability to collect call stacks for 64-bit .NET JITted applications and improvements in Hyper-V 3.
“Bing.com has already seen significant improvements by switching to Windows Server 2012 with the public RC. We basically cut %CPU time usage in half for critical servicing of managed applications (including GC) and startup times when restarting services. We achieved significant performance gains by making process monitoring easier and building it into the operating system,” wrote Sabharwal.
During a keynote Monday to open the company’s TechEd 2012 conference in Orlando this week, the head of the server and tools group said Microsoft runs 200 “very diverse workloads” on Bing.
Since it’s a cloud OS, it will be fairly easy for Microsoft to finally deploy the final code, since cloud services can simply be migrated off the hardware and the new OS installed. What it shows is that Server is solid and ready for deployment, not surprising given the excellent track record from the server and tools division.
