An open-source Linux distribution built and optimized for Azure, with sources derived from Fedora Linux. Azure Linux provides a secured, reliable operating system for virtual machines, containers, and bare-metal platforms.
Azure Linux is built on a robust open-source foundation and enhanced with Azure-specific innovations. This provides the familiarity of the RPM package ecosystem, while adding Azure-native security, compliance, and operational capabilities.
Key features of Azure Linux include: hardened security posture, an Azure-optimized kernel, supply chain security, native Azure integration, and a predictable lifecycle.
> Minneapolis - So, there I was at Open Source Summit North America, listening to Brendan Burns, co-founder of Kubernetes and today Microsoft's Corporate VP of Azure Cloud Native and Management Platform, and Open Source, talk about the evolution from open-source to agentic AI. Then, in the middle of his presentation, he said, "When I started in Azure 10 years ago, it was not the majority operating system running on the Azure cloud. It has become the majority operating system running on the Azure cloud in the past 10 years. And today, I think we're really excited to announce that we're going to be having Microsoft's open-source Linux distribution, a supported version of Linux supported by Microsoft, available on Azure, out for anybody to use."
> I blinked. Backstage, Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation's CEO, blinked, and all the Linux-savvy people in the crowd went "Huh?"
Any money I could have paid to be there would not have been enough to enjoy that reaction. Also that man has quite a background and title. Microsoft is company I like as a .NET developer, but they do some things wrong (so you could say I have a love and hate with them), but a lot of people don't realize they employ a lot of open source maintainers, and they release most of their software under the MIT license. Even .NET itself, is all MIT licensed.
Hell, the github for their Linux distro is MIT Licensed.
The logic reminds me of what happened to Edge, it became a Chromium fork. If Windows starts using Linux, and they just make a better rendition of "WINE" it could be really interesting.
People will hate me for saying this, but if in fact Microsoft rolled their own distribution, it would mean a lot of Microsoft $$$ goes into developing, maintaining and hardening the kernel, with Linus Torvalds gatekeeping the changes.
Who considers this a victory? There isn't a single post in this whole thread so far saying anything like that. Nothing in the article is saying it's a victory either.
I don’t really follow what they mean by no package manager. If you’re developing, won’t you need JavaScript or python or elixir or rust or go? This whole thing just run containers and your container still has to run some other distribution?
I guess it is good for Microsoft. By using fedora they can use red hats work. If Linux is cancer, then Microsoft is a parasite leeching off the cancer.
Note that despite being named here as "Azure Linux" and being described as a "General purpose Linux OS for Azure", once you go to the product documentation it's referred to as "Microsoft Azure Linux Container Host for AKS", and the Quickstart guide is about how to deploy a Kubernetes cluster. It doesn't seem very capable of general use.
The docs aren't set to be updated until after the "official" announcement at Build in a couple weeks, but this is a good call-out. We'll see about getting this updated to clarify.
To date, its only external exposure was as a container host for AKS. This announcement is about also offering it as a general-purpose OS for VMs in Azure. The public preview will come in a few weeks, at which point you'll see documentation showing how to use it in that capacity.
Source: I lead the AKS and Azure Linux PM teams at Microsoft.
On the contrary, Microsoft acknowledged those that buy NeXTSTEP evolution laptops to do Linux work, showing that actually any POSIX support will do, and since nowadays Linux distros have won the UNIX server room wars, they packaged Linux in a VM.
Just like Apple eventually did witn Virtualization Framework, because they cannot be bothered to keep pushing OS X Server.
Thus WSL alongside Virtualization Framework are the actual Year of Linux Desktop.
Many people predicted this coming sooner or later. I predict that end user Windows OS will some day die in favour of Linux. At first they will swap the kernel and next the userspace. Tell me crazy but so we told those back then.
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[ 7.1 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadAn open-source Linux distribution built and optimized for Azure, with sources derived from Fedora Linux. Azure Linux provides a secured, reliable operating system for virtual machines, containers, and bare-metal platforms.
Azure Linux is built on a robust open-source foundation and enhanced with Azure-specific innovations. This provides the familiarity of the RPM package ecosystem, while adding Azure-native security, compliance, and operational capabilities.
Key features of Azure Linux include: hardened security posture, an Azure-optimized kernel, supply chain security, native Azure integration, and a predictable lifecycle.
No thanks.
> I blinked. Backstage, Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation's CEO, blinked, and all the Linux-savvy people in the crowd went "Huh?"
Any money I could have paid to be there would not have been enough to enjoy that reaction. Also that man has quite a background and title. Microsoft is company I like as a .NET developer, but they do some things wrong (so you could say I have a love and hate with them), but a lot of people don't realize they employ a lot of open source maintainers, and they release most of their software under the MIT license. Even .NET itself, is all MIT licensed.
Hell, the github for their Linux distro is MIT Licensed.
https://web.archive.org/web/20251108032058/https://mslinux.o...
Prediction: Microsoft Is Going To Do The Funniest Thing Imaginable this guy called it loooong back
It does make complete sense, doesn't it?...
People will hate me for saying this, but if in fact Microsoft rolled their own distribution, it would mean a lot of Microsoft $$$ goes into developing, maintaining and hardening the kernel, with Linus Torvalds gatekeeping the changes.
Source: I lead the AKS and Azure Linux PM teams at Microsoft.
Just like Apple eventually did witn Virtualization Framework, because they cannot be bothered to keep pushing OS X Server.
Thus WSL alongside Virtualization Framework are the actual Year of Linux Desktop.