Microsoft is converting Azure Linux in a general-purpose cloud distribution, based on Fedora, available to all Azure customers, while also has the Flatcar like Azure Container Linux for immutable container hosts.
“When Microsoft joined the Linux Foundation, there was this big conspiracy theory that somehow the Linux Foundation was going to undermine open source by working with Microsoft, and now they’re announcing that they’re releasing a Linux distribution,” said Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation, in response to Microsoft’s unexpected announcement. “This is amazing.”
Until now, said Lachlan Everson, Microsoft's Principal Program Manager on the Azure open source team, "we've only had Azure Linux available to third parties through AKS (Azure Kubernetes Services) specifically, and that was Azure Linux 3.0″. In the future, that will be ACL (Azure Container Linux). Everson emphasized that Azure Linux 4.0 is the culmination of years of internal use and evolution of the previous Mariner distribution. “So, we’ve been using Azure Linux internally for many years and we got to version 3.0, and we only allowed it as a container host on AKS. What we did is make it general-purpose, as a lesson learned from the Mariner legacy.”
Azure Linux 4.0 is based on Fedora Linux and is available as an open source distribution on GitHub. The code is already available and Red Hat knows this.
Everson states:
"So, we made the decision to use Fedora as an upstream distribution, so we use RPM in the Fedora ecosystem. Microsoft is curating the packages and the supply chain to fit the Azure cloud platform."
Microsoft also created “Azure, which is vertically integrated across the entire infrastructure to give you the best Azure Linux experience on Azure.” While Azure Linux will be released as a VM image, Microsoft is already preparing a developer-friendly path to Windows desktops: “And starting today, we have it as a VM image for your VM on Azure. We will also announce WSL images.”
While developers will be able to run Azure Linux locally via WSL, Microsoft isn't positioning it as a traditional desktop Linux. Asked if he could run it on his laptop, Everson replied: "I'll be able to run it on my laptop or whatever. Yes, on Windows 11."
However, when asked about a desktop, Everson was clear that “there are no plans” for a graphical interface. “It’s optimized for the server side in the cloud.”
Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.
