Microsoft Surprises With its First Server Linux Distribution: Azure Linux 4.0
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
Microsoft has released Linux-based programs before. The first was the Azure Sphere edge computing device. This was followed by CBL-Mariner, a Linux-based container software platform, which was later renamed Azure Linux. Never, however, had Microsoft released a general-purpose Linux distro, until now.
That was it. That was all he said. Zemlin called him back onstage and asked if he'd really just announced a Microsoft Linux distro. Burns replied that yes, he had. Zemlin continued, "When Microsoft joined the Linux Foundation, there was this big conspiracy theory that somehow the Linux Foundation was undermining open source in partnership with Microsoft, and now you announce that you're shipping a Linux distribution. That's amazing."
He's right. It is. We've come a long way from the days when former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called Linux a cancer. Now, Burns said, "It's been a really great journey, and it's been awesome to see everybody within the company rally around it."
So why did the news catch us all by surprise? It was because the news was originally meant to be announced at Microsoft Techcon in two weeks. But, at the last minute, Microsoft decided to let the news out now.
Burns left the conference before I could get further details, but the Linux Foundation's crack PR team arranged for me to meet Lachlan Everson, Microsoft's principal program manager on Azure's open-source team. He told me Microsoft is turning Azure Linux into a full-fledged general-purpose cloud distribution with Azure Linux 4.0 while simultaneously productizing Flatcar Container Linux as a hardened, immutable container host called Azure Container Linux (ACL).
The former is a general-purpose virtual machine (VM) image for all Azure customers, not just Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) users. Until now, Everson noted, "we had Azure Linux only available to third-party customers through AKS specifically, and that was Azure Linux 3.0." Going forward, this will be ACL.
Everson emphasized that Azure Linux 4.0 is the culmination of years of internal usage and the evolution of the earlier Mariner distribution. "So we've been running Azure Linux for many years internally, and we got through to 3.0, and we only allowed it on as a container host on AKS. What we've done is make it a general-purpose, so this is all the learnings that we've had in the heritage of Mariner."
Under the hood, Azure Linux 4.0 is based on Fedora Linux and is delivered as an open distribution on GitHub. This code is available now. Yes, Red Hat knows that Microsoft has done this. Everson continued, "So, we made a decision to use Fedora as an upstream, so it's using RPMs in the Fedora ecosystem. Microsoft curates the packages and the supply chain to fit Azure's cloud platform." Microsoft also created "it to be purpose-built for Azure, which integrates vertically into all of our infrastructure to give you the best Azure Linux experience on Azure."
While Azure Linux will ship as a VM image, Microsoft is already preparing a developer-friendly path onto Windows desktops: "And as of today, we have it as a VM image for your VM host on Azure. We're going to announce WSL images as well."
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