The outfit which once described Open Sauce as a cancer on the software industry, Microsoft has finally gone full penguin, turning Azure Linux into a Fedora-based cloud distro for all Azure customers.
According to ZDNet the outfit is making Azure Linux a general-purpose cloud distribution while productising Flatcar as Azure Container Linux for immutable container hosts.
Linux Foundation chief executive Jim Zemlin seemed amused by the turn of events saying: “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.”
Microsoft principal programme manager on Azure’s open-source team Lachlan Everson said Azure Linux had previously been limited to third-party customers through AKS. “We had Azure Linux only available to third-party customers through AKS specifically, and that was Azure Linux 3.0. That role becomes Azure Container Linux, or ACL”
Everson said Azure Linux 4.0 came from years of internal use and the earlier Mariner distribution.
“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 bonnet, Azure Linux 4.0 is based on Fedora Linux and ships as an open distribution on GitHub. Red Hat knows Vole has done this, which spares everyone the tedious corporate surprise face.
“We decided to use Fedora as an upstream, so it’s using RPMs in the Fedora ecosystem. Vole curates the packages and the supply chain to fit Azure’s cloud platform,” Everson said.
Microsoft built 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.”
Azure Linux will ship as a VM image, but Microsoft is preparing a developer route onto Windows desktops through WSL and there will be a VM image for your VM host on Azure. And WSL images later.
Developers will be able to run Azure Linux locally through WSL, but Microsoft is not pitching it as a desktop Linux. Pressed on a desktop experience, Everson said there are “no plans” for a graphical environment and it is just optimised for server-side in the cloud.
Even on a developer machine, users should expect a lean setup rather than a cuddly desktop with wallpaper and wobbly windows.
“Minimal packages, yeah. The idea is that we offer you a consistent experience to develop on your machine, and that you can take your workloads as you develop them and run them with VS Code. You can run your applications on that, and know that the platform is the same that you’re running on the cloud, so that you have that kind of consistency between environments.”
Flatcar remains the upstream project, but Microsoft is packaging it for Azure customers.
Everson described Flatcar as “purpose-built, immutable, secure by default, production-ready operating system, and Azure Container Linux is the productisation of that, but we’re still investing in the upstream Flatcar ecosystem and pulling that downstream into a productized exterior experience just for container workloads, so it’s a container hosting in AKS.”
The immutable bit means customers do not poke around with system packages like it is 2004 and everything is a pet server.
“Everything’s baked in, so there is no package manager. We bake the bits into the immutable, and they’re in the immutable version. So Azure Container Linux is the immutable version. So you shouldn’t be changing any system packages or any application packages. Anything that you need to change is customer workloads run in containers,” Everson said.
