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Microsoft's Azure Linux
- bchewyme 9mo agodamn when did this come out?
- RajT88 9mo agoPandemic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azure_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azure_Linux
- shevy-java 9mo agoPanzure!
- brunoborges 9mo agoTechnically, Azure Linux was announced long time ago, but it was named CBL-D / CBL-Mariner. The "Azure Linux" brand was released in 2023: https://devclass.com/2023/05/25/azure-linux-released-at-build-where-microsoft-revealed-why-it-did-not-fork-fedora/ https://devclass.com/2023/05/25/azure-linux-released-at-buil... But the CBL-Mariner distribution (based on Debian) has existed since long before, and I believe it was formally announced sometime in 2021: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-released-cbl-mariner-linux-distro https://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-released-cbl-mar...
- genewitch 9mo agoi know 2021 feels like a lifetime ago, but AWS had linux (Amazon Linux?) a decade before that (maybe even 18 years ago?) When i think "azure" i think AD, winserver DCE, and so on. Obviously if they want complete vendor lock in they have to have first party linux, too, rather than people doing hypervisors on VMs on hypervisors.
- osigurdson 9mo ago>> When i think "azure" i think AD, winserver DCE, and so on That is interesting, when I think Azure, I just think "AWS" but in different regions and a clunky / overthought UI.
- genewitch 9mo agoi used to call myself a "cloud engineer" 14 years ago, me and a friend developed a formal way to deploy thin clients using AWS as the host, and it worked well for everything including youtube videos. this was in 2009, we had both been working with AWS since the first "public" instances became available. So i suppose when azure was announced and came out, i was acutely aware of what they offered, and it was, you know, marginally cheaper than the AWS windows servers, as azure didn't have to pay microsoft as much for DCE licenses, maybe. But it makes sense they have Linux now, as i said, ecosystem lock-in...
- stephenr 9mo ago> based on Debian Are you sure about that? Everything I can find now and from when it was first covered suggests that it's an RPM based "distro" (let's not argue about whether it's technically a distro). The TomsHardware article you linked to in turns links to ZDNet which in turn links to an InfoWorld article (isn't modern reposted rehashed "news" slop just fucking delightful) about the "release" of CBL-Mariner notes that it was created as a replacement to the then-recently-deprecated RedHat CoreOS, and references that (at the time) MS had a deal with a company that was supporting a CoreOS fork. Given those two factors, it isn't impossible but it seems hard to believe that they would use a Debian base but then Frankenstein RPM package manage into it.
- shevy-java 9mo agoEven Microsoft is betting on Linux now. No wonder given Win11 not being popular! :D
- lynndotpy 9mo agoWhile I agree Windows 11 is abysmal, Azure Linux is nothing new.
- thayne 9mo agoAzure has been using Linux from the beginning.
- CodeCompost 9mo agoGenuine question: Is Azure a giant Kubernetes cluster?
- paulddraper 9mo ago> now This has been true from day 1. As you saw the repo has been around for quite some time.
- jansan 9mo agoThe strategy "Embrace, extend and extinguish" by Microsoft even has its own Wikipedia page.
- jaboutboul 9mo agoConspiracy theory
- randunel 9mo agoAre you really claiming the US-DoJ are conspiracy theorists?
- mcintyre1994 9mo agoIt might be when used now, but it was used by Microsoft internally at the time. First part of that Wikipedia page: > "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE), also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used open standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and using the differences to strongly disadvantage its competitors.
- unixhero 9mo agoThis is the most absurd news I have read in a while. I for one welcome our new open source overlords.
- jmspring 9mo agoHow is this different from Amazon Linux - the base for EC2/etc?
- pests 9mo agoDoes amazon make an OS like Windows? Did Amazon wage a multi year long war against Linux and the open source philosophy in its history?
- jmspring 9mo agoLinux for their respective cloud resources. Neither is intended to really be a public distro.
- paulddraper 9mo agoNo. Amazon wasn’t even a twinkle in its father’s eye.
- jajuuka 9mo agoIt's super weird people are bitter about things that happened almost two decades ago. Much less there was no war. I think Ballmer said some mean words about Linux and Microsoft sued Lindows for infringement and won. After the rename to Linspire Microsoft actually worked with them on compatibility. The whole Windows v Linux "war" is completely contrived by some fans of Linux as some holy war.
- sellmesoap 9mo agoDidn't Microsoft throw SCO some bones to help sue linux vendors? Heres a hasty link to an article about it https://www.techmonitor.ai/technology/microsoft_offered_to_underwrite_sco_funding_says_baystar/ https://www.techmonitor.ai/technology/microsoft_offered_to_u...
- binsquare 9mo agoNothing new,this is meant for their cloud Linux boxes. Not meant to replace windows 11 as others are suggesting
- Sytten 9mo agoNot even at gunpoint would I choose Azure as my cloud provider but great for Linux
- d4lt4 9mo ago[dead]
- osigurdson 9mo agoI can't believe it is that bad!
- yoyohello13 9mo agoMy company picked Azure. So I work with it every day and it is extremely painful to deploy anything that’s not a dotnet application on azure dev ops. One time the app service deployment pipeline just silently failed while trying to build our app. We only found out our new code didn’t deploy when someone asked about the new features expected to go out. The management portal is super slow, every time you click a button it’s basically a roll of the dice whether the action will work or not. And as with most things Microsoft these days there are reams of docs detailing every single feature, and none of it fucking works as described. I will say, if you just want to deploy a quick app from VSCode from your local machine or whatever, it works great. But if you need anything off the golden path it quickly becomes frustrating.
- jaboutboul 9mo agoWould love to hear more about your frustration and how it can be fixed. Message me at my nick @microsoft.com please.
- yoyohello13 9mo agoThanks, sorry for my tone yesterday. It was the end of a long frustrating work day. Azure Linux does look interesting, thank you for working on it. Fedora is a great choice as a base image. Having a Fedora based distro designed to work well with WSL would be amazing! As a base image for apps though I'm curious how you manage the 6month release cycle. Are you planning on expended support, or would people using it need to upgrade every 6 months. I think the appeal of a Debian base is we only need to think about big upgrades every 2 years. A few bits of Azure feedback I can think of now. Probably not directly related to what you work on, but just some of my experiences working with Azure for the last year. 1. The CLI is good, I think maintaining feature parity between the CLI and portal is really helpful and allows us to integrate with our internal infra more easily. Azure CLI is really the best part working with the service. 2. The management portal is really flaky. Like unknown error messages pop up when clicking on deployment logs. Sometimes the SSH or log tail functions just don't load at all and overall the experience just feels sluggish. I'm really not sure what can be done about this but I've been moving to the CLI just because the web interface is frustrating to work with. 3. The Microsoft documentation is really verbose and difficult to navigate in my opinion. Like we were looking in to hosting a Teams bot and those docs are full of emoji and full page articles like 'why did we make an SDK?'. I have to jump around several pages to get to what I need and even then the code examples in the docs are not actually in sync with the current version of the SDK library. It feels like AI was just set loose to write as much as possible. I think the problem is the information density of much of the documentation is very low. Maybe that's something that can be addressed going forward.
- natas 9mo agoqemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom AzureLinux-3.0-x86_64.iso -boot d -m 2048
- jaboutboul 9mo agoHey! I’m part of the larger Azure Linux team. Glad to answer any questions. It is a tad late here though so drop em and I’ll get to them in the morning!
- voidr 9mo agoWhy RPM and not DEB or something more modern? Is it for Read Had compatibility?
- jaboutboul 9mo agoIt was initially based on deb in the earlier iterations of its life, but ultimately, we decided to use Fedora as a base as a good balance between stability and new feature enablement. That decision also makes it easier for us to contribute to Fedora upstream and collab with others, for example AWS uses Fedora for the base of Amazon Linux too, so there may be ways we can work together to solve common problems. I'm not making any future/promise statements with that comment. My point is, we are happy to collab upstream, using real open-source, community pathways.
- kmacleod 9mo agoI've created and managed five distributions for two companies. I've found RPM to have slightly easier tooling across the whole stack, from developers building individual RPMs/specs up through building and managing 1000s of RPMs across multiple releases. The Fedora build model makes a great reference and source of tools for spinning your own distributions.
- ndsipa_pomu 9mo agoMy experience over the years with a few Linux distributions is that rpm based distros always seem to give me more problems with dependencies and always seems harder to fix. These days I much prefer deb based distributions, mainly Ubuntu as I like their trade-off between stability and newer versions though I'm not a fan of snap packages.
- VladStanimir 9mo ago
- superb_dev 9mo agoIs Azure running its hypervisors on Linux these days? I read awhile back that they were switching from Windows
- pjmlp 9mo agoIt is still Azure Host OS, officially. There was a project to add Hyper-V like capabilities to Azure Linux fork, but they went silent after the announcement.
- jaboutboul 9mo agoNo. It’s still very much Hyper-V running a custom build of what you can call windows underneath.
- pjmlp 9mo agoIt is called Azure Host OS. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windowsosplatform/azure-host-os-%E2%80%93-cloud-host/3709528 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windowsosplatform/a...
- apublicfrog 9mo ago> Another thing you may have noticed is that the taskmgr or even regedit does not look the same as you would see on Windows 11. This is because as I mentioned, Cloud Host is built on OneCore and it is headless (or console based), hence, it doesn’t contain any of the GUI pieces of Windows. We have a special taskmgr and regedit version that doesn’t link with all the modern GUI functionality available in Windows 11, which gives them the “old style” look. I haven't used Windows in a long time, so it looked normal to me. I just went and watched a video on Windows 11, goodness me.
- rolph 9mo agoeven microsoft knows better than to use windows for infrastructure.
- Datagenerator 9mo agoWhere is the downvote button? Remember: it's EEE all the way.
- bandrami 9mo agoWasn't part of one of the big lawsuits 30 years ago that Microsoft could not market a UNIX derivative?
- zer0zzz 9mo agoHow is Linux a Unix derivative apart from some guy in Finland reading a sysV syscall manual in 1990?
- bandrami 9mo agoI don't think SCO's claim ever got adjudicated but it was enough to let them shake down multiple companies
- zer0zzz 9mo agoAhh yeah I remember that one now.
- ndsipa_pomu 9mo agoIIRC SCO's claim was flawed as they didn't produce the infringing code and doubly flawed as they didn't even own the right to the Unix code.
- steve1977 9mo agoI mean Microsoft actually had a quite successful UNIX derivative named Xenix in the 80s (later sold to SCO).
- bandrami 9mo agoRight, that was mentioned in the case IIRC; they didn't want that to happen again
- jmclnx 9mo agoInteresting question. I remember M/S sold or spun off Xenix, but I thought that was due to them wanting to focus on DOS and Windows. Found this and the answer is "no" :) Seems they rid of it due to Bell Labs breakup, see "Transfer of ownership to SCO": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix
- ajcp 9mo agoHaving watched MSFT slowly chip away at their traditional bread-and-butter OS model with things like OneDrive and Office in the browser, Azure and then WSL, and listening to the Acquired podcast episodes on Microsoft, I wonder why they haven't simply released a Microsoft Linux by now, if only out of pride? Do they feel that by doing so they're broadcasting that they're no longer a computing philosophy leader, and merely a market preference fulfiller (which is itself a backhanded way of saying they meet market demand I guess).
- perfmode 9mo agoConceding superiority to Linux would make them a computing philosophy leader.
- franktankbank 9mo agoIf left at that. More likely to committee infect in reality.
- poisonborz 9mo agoAsk a very simple question: how would this generate profits, which high level manager would be motivated to do this? Sure, 15-20 years ago corporations would've made vanity/critics-industry appeasing projects like this out of pride alone. Those times are over.
- jaboutboul 9mo agoTo answer all the comments in this thread at once, and this is my personal opinion, building a distro is easy, releasing a distro and supporting customers that use it is much harder.
- klipklop 9mo agoI wonder where this sits in the “Embrace, extend and extinguish” cycle. I would avoid this distro like the plague for fear of future lock-in.
- deafpolygon 9mo agoIf it’s derived from Red Hat, I don’t understand why not simply work/collaborate with Red Hat on this rather than splitting the codebase and creating new forks?
- jaboutboul 9mo agowe do work and collaborate in fedora upstream. the reason for having a separate distro is to serve a different audience. there are several things to balance like life/supportability cycle, hardware enablement vs. legacy work, etc.
- knbknb 9mo agoHow many Microsoft employees are working on Azure Linux in 2026 (full-time equivalents)? Github Project Page lists ~ 195 contributors today. Is Azure Linux relying on community contributions, and MS employees do not write code, justt review, plan, coordinate? Or is it the other way around, Microsoft developers do most of the work, and occasionally accept a small PR and interesting feature requests from the community, here and there?
- smitty1e 9mo agoTorvalds wept.
- senectus1 9mo agonah, he loves it.
- direwolf20 9mo agoTorvalds is a huge supporter of tivoization and thinks the GPLv3 was a mistake.
- smitty1e 9mo agoThe John11:35 allusion appears to have escaped everyone. Oh well.
- senectus1 8mo agooh ha ok. yeah, not a big follower of that kind of literature.