Would You Bet Your Enterprise On Azure Linux?

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Azure Linux is Microsoft's take on the open source operating system. It is primarily used for internal purposes, but could it become (yet another) distribution option?

Directions on Microsoft analyst Mary Jo Foley suggests the distribution, tuned to be lightweight and secure, has the potential to reach a wider audience.

Because, let's face it, if there's one thing the Linux world needs, it's another distribution for administrators to consider.

Azure Linux was known as CBL-Mariner before it was rebranded, and thank your lucky stars that happened in 2023. Lately, it would probably end up being called Copilot for Linux or something similar.

Downloadable from GitHub, Azure Linux can be found running as a container host operating system for the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and supports both x86 and Arm.

The latter point is significant. There is currently no publicly supported version of Windows Server that runs on Arm, despite Microsoft hyping Arm technology via its Copilot+ PCs and datacenter operators increasingly favoring the hardware's lower power-sipping tendencies. While porting and supporting all of Windows Server's functions to the Linux platform would be a stretch, there is the potential for Microsoft to compete in the Linux enterprise server space.

Foley noted that the world probably doesn't need another Linux distribution. However, the end of support for CentOS has opened up a window of opportunity - even for Microsoft.

"More customer compute in Azure is running Linux on Azure than Windows Server on Azure," according to Foley. Thus, it is hard to think that Microsoft would not like to be part of that besides hosting the workloads.

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