In just a few years, Microsoft has become the world's largest promoter of Linux. A title the company owes, among other things, to its efforts in this area on its Microsoft Azure cloud platform. The firm is announcing the launch of an open source Linux distribution platform that should accelerate the adoption of open source technologies.
Who would have thought? While Steve Ballmer deemed that “Linux is a cancer,” the company is embracing the free operating system revolution under Satya Nadella. While still offering a large number of proprietary technologies in Windows – which still remains a locked-down and paid operating system.
Nevertheless, for years, on the Microsoft Azure cloud service, the company's customers have been favoring Linux. To the point that today, 60% of the services hosted on the platform run on one of its many distributions. Until now, however, customers were limited in their approach.
Microsoft takes a new key step in its support for Linux
Particularly through the use of Kubernetes containers. But the firm has finally decided to remove all the remaining obstacles to environments entirely based on Linux. Microsoft announces the release of a new open source Linux distribution and automated image testing platform.
The service is designed to facilitate the deployment, testing, and management of Linux images on Azure servers. The software leverages the expertise developed by Microsoft since the company fully embraced open source. Called ATIL, the distribution platform provides security-enhanced Linux images optimized for Azure.
All this with automated quality control and compliance verification. The images offered by the service integrate easily with all native Azure services and Kubernetes environments. One of Azure's leaders, Andrew Randall, explains: "This is an exciting new era at Microsoft... Azure, which initially only allowed its customers a Linux + Kubernetes + open source solution, now allows full adoption of this approach for tomorrow's next-gen cloud services."
Beyond Microsoft Azure, many Linux distributions are also accessible on Windows 11 via the WSL2 system. This integration is still incomplete and leaves something to be desired.
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