Microsoft released Windows Server 2022 a few weeks ago. It did so earlier than expected, which is pretty odd, but it seems that the development of new features was already complete and mature so there was no point to wait a few months more. The last sentence pretty much explains the current status of Windows Server: so few changes, albeit interesting ones, that the product can be released months earlier than planned and without much fanfare.

While generally speaking the development of new features and functionalities for server applications mostly moved out of the base operating system and while we can also concede that Windows Server has many features at the OS level so it is difficult to design new ones, the fact each new release of Windows Server keeps bringing few new features is definitely because of Microsoft errors. Server applications today are either simple, think about a website or a Web application, or complicated. In the latter case, you generally think about microservices, Kubernetes and so on.

So we might say that since a few years Windows Server became more a tool to build base infrastructures than the base for new applications. That means that you usually install something on top of Windows Server to manage and deploy applications and you don’t usually rely on OS services only to develop your application. It is safe to say that it is a common scenario because Linux too is experiencing the same transformation.

However, Microsoft could have responded to Linux popularity by upping the ante and push more innovation into Windows Server and they didn’t.

Windows Server 2022 – continued fragmentation

The new Windows Server version has some nice and neat features. Besides a better Kubernetes compatibility, which is basically mandatory today, it features and big work to improve security. Credit where is due. That improves a lot both standalone servers security but it is also a fundamental improvement when deploying clusters, the famous infrastructures.

Other improvements include TLS 1.3 enabled by default and a few improvements around SMB, all of them improve security.

There would be other two important features to mention, one of them would be very important, but surprise: they won’t be available to all customers but only to those using Azure. At least for now.

Microsoft introduced Windows Server Datacenter: Azure Edition, another attempt to fragment Windows Server but the first one to draw a line between “standard” Windows Server and Azure versions. And we cannot welcome this kind of behavior because it basically starts to leave non-Azure Windows Server installations behind in an attempt to force Windows customers to move to Azure. Quite frankly, this is indecent especially when you factor how much Windows Server costs when compared to its competitor.

Features that Microsoft is withholding from its non-Azure customers are very important.

First, there is the much awaited hot-patching, that is a way to patch Windows without rebooting. Microsoft aims to use hot-patching especially for security patches and it would be a very ground-breaking innovation when considering how many emergency updates are needed [...]