Azure was once a cloud platform devoted to Home windows. Now, it is probably the most extensively used working system on Microsoft Azure. The New Stack’s Joab Jackson writes: Lately, Microsoft expends appreciable effort that Linux runs as easily as potential on Azure, in response to a chat given earlier this 12 months on the Linux Basis Open Supply Summit given by two Microsoft Azure Linux Platforms Group program managers, Jack Aboutboul, and Krum Kashan. “Linux is the #1 working system in Azure as we speak,” Aboutoul mentioned. And all should be supported in a means that Microsoft customers have come to expects. Therefore, the necessity for the Microsoft’s Linux Platforms Group, which supplies assist Linux to each the inner clients and to Azure clients. Lately, the duo of engineers defined, Microsoft is aware of about as a lot as anybody about the way to function Linux at hyperscale. […]
As of as we speak, there are tons of of Azure and Azure-based companies operating on Linux, together with the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), OpenAI, HDInsight, and lots of the different database companies. “Loads of the infrastructure powering all the things else is operating on Linux,” Aboutoul mentioned. “They’re completely different flavors of Linux operating in all places,” Aboutoul mentioned. To run these companies, Microsoft maintains its personal kernel, Azure Linux, and in 2023 the corporate launched its personal model of Linux, Azure Linux. However Azure Linux is only a small portion of all the opposite flavors of Linux operating on Azure, all of which Microsoft should work with to assist.
General, there are about 20,000 third-party Software program as a Service (SaaS) packages within the Azure market that depend on some Linux distribution. And when issues go improper, it’s the Azure service engineers who get the assistance tickets. The corporate retains a set of endorsed Linux distributions, which embody Purple Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian, Flatcar, Suse, Canonical, and Oracle Linux and CentOS (as managed by OpenLogic, not Purple Hat). […] General, the corporate will get about 1,000 photos a month from these endorsed companions alone. Most of the distributions have a number of photos (Suse has a daily one, and one other one for high-performance computing, as an illustration).