I had similar thoughts about VMware (large installations) back in the day. Weird proprietary OS to run other operating systems? Yet they turned out fine.

This appears to be a much better system than VMware, is free as in software, and it builds upon a free software operating system with lineage that predates Linux.

I say this in the most critical way possible, as someone who has built multiple Linux-based "cloud systems", and as a GNU/Linux distribution developer: I love it!

It was totally a risky choice for companies in the 1990s and early 2000s to put all their web stuff onto Linux on commodity hardware instead of proprietary Unix or Windows servers. Many did it when their website being up was totally mission critical. Lots did it on huge server farms. It paid off very quickly but it's erasing history to suggest that it didn't require huge amounts of guts, savvy and agility to even attempt it.

Indeed, for me GNU/Linux was always a cheap way to have UNIX at home, given that Windows NT POSIX support never was that great.

The first time I actually saw GNU/Linux powering something in production was in 2003, when I joined CERN and they were replacing their use of Solaris, and eventually alongside Fermilabs came up with Scientific Linux in 2004.

Later at Nokia, it took them until 2006 to consider Red-Hat Linux a serious alternative to their HP-UX infrastructure.

Completely tangential, but this reminds me of an interview I had for my first job out of college in 1995. I mentioned to the interviewer that I had some Linux experience. "Ah, Linux" he said. "A cool little toy that's gonna take over the world".

In hindsight of course it was remarkably prescient. This from a guy at a company that was built entirely around SGI at the time.

This is a skewed view - the critical piece that made Linux "enterprise-ish" was the memory management system that was contributed by IBM, part of the SCO lawsuit