At its Build developer event this week, Microsoft made Azure Linux – its own distribution of the open source operating system – generally

Azure Linux released at Build – where Microsoft revealed why it did not fork Fedora • DEVCLASS

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2023-05-26 20:00:07

At its Build developer event this week, Microsoft made Azure Linux – its own distribution of the open source operating system – generally available. During a Q&A session the principal program manager lead Jim Perrin also spoke about how the company’s history with Linux – Steve Ballmer, then CEO, said in 2001 that “Linux is a cancer” – was still felt today, impacting the decision to build a new distribution from scratch rather than forking an existing one such as Fedora.

Azure Linux is the same distribution as CBL-Mariner, where CBL stands for Common Base Linux, and is still known by that name in its GitHub repository. Strictly, as explained by Perrin at a Build Q&A session, Azure Linux is “the commercially supported offering for CBL Mariner Linux.” Even the commercially supported aspect is limited, since the current primary purpose of the OS is to run as the container host for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). This means that Azure Linux itself runs as a VM on Hyper-V, Microsoft’s Windows hypervisor, and it is optimized for this scenario, though bare metal installs on x64 or ARM64 are also possible.

At Build, Microsoft emphasized that Azure Linux has “a very opinionated Azure focus” and intentionally includes “just the bare essentials for getting a Kubernetes cluster running”, according to Perrin. That said, other product teams may build on it for other purposes, an example being the .NET team. Some container workloads use Azure Linux but Microsoft’s official support extends only to the host.