Microsoft's Azure Linux distro is now generally available:
After using Azure Linux internally for two years and running it in public preview since October 2022, Microsoft this week finally made its distribution generally available.
Azure Linux is an open-source container host OS for the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) that is optimized for Azure and aimed at making it easier for developers to use Microsoft's tools to deploy and manage container workloads. That's basically it: Azure Linux is designed to be deployed in the cloud and run multiple containers.
The Azure Linux distro stems from the IT giant's CBL-Mariner project, CBL standing for Common Base Linux. Microsoft started CBL-Mariner because it needed an internal Linux distro and a consistent platform for the myriad workloads engineers were running on Azure, according to Jim Perrin, principal program manager for Microsoft Azure Linux.
The Microsoft-customized open-source distribution "allows us to have a very defined, very opinionated Azure focus and to tune the components of the distribution to be exactly what we need to support a container host and try to keep the dependencies, extraneously packages, things like that to a minimum," Perrin said during a Q&A session at Build 2023, where Redmond announced Azure Linux's general availability.
The "very opinionated" part of that means Azure Linux's primary role is as a container host for AKS. It's optimized for Microsoft's Windows Hyper-V hypervisor and runs in a virtual machine (VM), supporting both x86 and Arm, he said.
That said, it's got some broad applicability.
"The Azure Linux container host provides reliability and consistency from cloud to edge across the AKS, AKS-HCI, and Arc products," Microsoft wrote in a support page. "You can deploy Azure Linux node pools in a new cluster, add Azure Linux node pools to your existing Ubuntu clusters, or migrate your Ubuntu nodes to Azure Linux nodes."
The lightweight nature of the distribution is a key point, Perrin said. The small footprint includes a 400MB core image and 300 packages, which Microsoft said works well for both performance and security.
[...] A number of tech players have signed on as Microsoft partners for Azure Linux, including Tenable, DataDog, HashiCorp, and Dynatrace.
Palo Alto Networks is supporting Azure Linux as an AKS container host through its Prisma Cloud, said Derek Rogerson, senior product marketing manager at the network security vendor, noting that the smaller image size means greater.
"The result for customers is a reduced attack surface and helpful elimination of time-consuming patching and maintenance that's no longer needed due to the removal of unnecessary packages," Rogerson wrote in a blog post.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Monday May 29 2023, @03:58PM (3 children)
Extend.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 29 2023, @04:09PM (1 child)
Colleague at work was trying to make our Ubuntu based system work under WSL, failed. Trying now under WSL2, still failing.
I'm sure if we developed under WSL2 from the start it would have similar problems migrating out to any FOSS distro.
Thing is, our system started life in CentOS, migrated to Ubuntu 16.04 painlessly, and is now running in Ubuntu 22.04. Will WSL2 even be supported in 2030?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Monday May 29 2023, @04:15PM
WSL and WSL2 aren't supposed to actually work. They're just supposed to give enough of an illusion of a chance at working that people will burn their time budget allocated to Linux on it without leaving Windows or, worse, trying actual Linux. That way they'll use up their time on trying to get WSL / WSL2 to work and then when the time runs out have to drop it saying that "Linux doesn't work". That would be instead of having used that time budget on actual Linux and getting something done, an even which would be devastating to m$ tiny and dwindling server market share. In other words, WSL / WSL2 failing to produce results is the outcome that m$ intended for it from the beginning: It keeps the curious from wandering off the reservation.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2023, @05:35PM
"Microsoft has kind of a history with Linux," Perrin said during the Q&A. "Those quotes and that animosity are old enough to drink now … but a lot of the sentiment still lingers today, so part of the reason that we did not choose to start with a distribution and fork it for our needs is we didn't want to be seen as doing the embrace-and-extend thing again. We didn't want to wake any of that up.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mcgrew on Monday May 29 2023, @03:59PM (15 children)
This answers my question: WHY? But it begs another question that maybe somebody here can answer. Since most servers are already Linux, WHY Microsoft? It's been my observation since the 1980s that they employ the world's very worst designers and programmers. Whoever had the idea to redesign the interface with every upgrade must be rotting in hell next to the guy who developed Autocorrect. And morons copy Microsoft!
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 5, Insightful) by turgid on Monday May 29 2023, @04:07PM (2 children)
If they can get us hooked on their own Linux, then they can start extending it in subtle ways to break compatibility with the rest of the Linux world. Then we are locked into Microsoft Linux.
It's how they work: embrace, extend, extinguish.
Remember they tried to pull a fast one with Java and there was the lawsuit? Then they were forced to rename it C#.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Monday May 29 2023, @05:03PM (1 child)
I understand why Microsoft wants it, I'm curious as to why anyone running Linux for anything would want it.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 5, Insightful) by turgid on Monday May 29 2023, @05:29PM
Have you had any dealings with business types in the last few years? Everything is Microsoft Azure cloud services. Why would the advice and needs of the Engineers have any relevance on anything?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 29 2023, @04:13PM (3 children)
>the world's very worst designers and programmers.
Be kind to the programmers, even the architects, I blame chair throwing management for the wretched state of MS tech.
The best programmers can't fix a broken corporate culture.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Monday May 29 2023, @05:40PM
For the youngsters, there's a cultural reference there. They might also like to investigate the monkey dance.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday May 30 2023, @05:03PM (1 child)
I guess that explains why I curse at FOSS a whole lot less than proprietary software. Why should I buy junk when the good stuff is free?
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday May 30 2023, @10:28PM
The primary benefit of FOSS is: when you want to fix something (badly enough) you can.
We needed to add a metadata channel to MPEG2 video, in FOSS it took about 120 man-hours all in, maybe $9K in development costs, zero continuing costs, and our products had that feature integrated and available to our paying customers.
6 of those man hours were spent arguing for / against a proprietary alternative that still needed code modification (estimated hours: 80-120) to integrate with our product, and they wanted a $20k support contract to help us do that so we could then pay them continuing license costs for the life of the product.
I spent 5 minutes telling the concerned parties that FOSS was the clear choice and set about making it so. About a week in, the paid support advocate finally understood that I was not only investigating FOSS but showing early success, at which point we had to have meetings to hear him restate his case for the commercial option. If he was going to implement and maintain the thing, I would have deferred, but realistically he was much better at writing grant applications than software, and I suspect that padding those applications with external software costs probably works better for him than more internal hours - even though in this case the internal hours were roughly equivalent.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday May 29 2023, @04:29PM
Corporate and government customers want some Linux just because, Microsoft provides one such that is unusable beyond Azure cloud, retaining full control over technology chain.
One part of their strategy is to demolish LSB compatibility (which means some least portability between distros), that's what CBL is meant for.
Their current enemy is Ubuntu, no doubts. So, the future divergence steps will bring some fancy incompatibility with Debian and Ubuntu, I can tell with my eyes closed.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Monday May 29 2023, @04:38PM (1 child)
Everything AWS does, has to be copied years later by Azure.
Really the question is if original Amazon Linux (which IIRC is basically Fedora with AWS CLI installed and rebranded) was released in ... '11 or something, how did it take Microsoft until 2023 to copycat?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday May 30 2023, @02:50AM
You're close: It's closely tracking RHEL, not Fedora, and at this point they're on major version 2. My understanding is that in addition to some AWS-specific bells and whistles like out-of-the-box AWS API stuff, it also is optimized to run well on the hardware they use at AWS data centers (which probably means things like a customized kernel that includes exactly what's needed for that environment and fewer things not needed). Expect to use yum as your package manager, there's definitely some tools that make your life a bit easier for cloud computing that are in the Amazon Linux repository, because they want you to have a fairly easy time wrangling EC2 servers that use it while also pushing you towards the less self-managed things they have to offer.
And yes, you're right that this is something that's more-or-less trying to be a direct copy of AWS's Elastic Kubernites Service, something they've had around for a while. They also offer a more proprietary container cluster system. In both cases, setting those up behind a load balancer with a reasonable auto-scaling setup can solve a lot of headaches related to hardware capacity, so it's worth considering if you're trying to solve those kinds of problems.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RS3 on Monday May 29 2023, @04:40PM
As I've said before, we tech-types don't make the tech decisions- business-types (MBAs, etc.) do. MS is appealing to the Dilbert CEO country club set who like to sound kewl and hip and up on using the latest tech. So the Dilbert CEO types will order the tech staff to start embracing Linux, and as others have said it will have problems, if it works at all, and eventually they'll go back to pure M$, leaving a bad sentiment about "Linux" (as if it was a monolithic thing anyway).
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2023, @05:37PM (2 children)
Linux is a fragmented mess. It's not impossible for Microsoft to come in and do Linux better than Linux, and they will probably do that one day. But this is narrowly tailored to Azure services.
(Score: 4, Informative) by turgid on Monday May 29 2023, @05:51PM
Oh no it isn't [kernel.org].
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday May 30 2023, @02:59AM
It really isn't.
Are there a lot of distros out there? Yes. Are they all a bit different? Yes. But, and this is the key, all the really important stuff is close enough to identical across the board that anything you can get running on one of them you can get running on all of them without a ridiculous amount of effort. Also, because odds are pretty good that what you're trying to move to a different distro, other people are trying to move as well, it's approximately guaranteed that some combination of people trying to solve that problem will put their heads together and turn it into a package that can be pulled in as needed. And in that edge case where it hasn't happened yet, you can almost always get all the tools needed to do it yourself.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 30 2023, @06:51AM
Like this guy and similar? https://github.com/migueldeicaza [github.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by isostatic on Monday May 29 2023, @05:31PM
Took them 20 years to "get that darn foot out of there"
http://mslinux.org/ [mslinux.org]
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday May 29 2023, @08:22PM (1 child)
If the license was correct, I *MIGHT* consider a windows system that run under Linux. I'd never consider MSWind as my base OS. And the license would have to be a LOT different from the last MSWind license I read.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 29 2023, @09:50PM
Our product runs Windows 10 embedded under VirtualBox under Ubuntu. Thus constrained and protected from network connectivity, Windows is relatively benign, and our existing Windows embedded programmers don't need retraining / replacement.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by AlwaysNever on Tuesday May 30 2023, @12:10AM
Can this "Microsoft’s Azure Linux Distro" be installed on my laptop's Hyper-V role?
If not, what we have here is a non-news.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday May 30 2023, @02:50PM
Maybe MS will give up on the NT kernel and make Windows 12 based on Linux.
I know the answer is no, but I can dream, right? If MS build a GUI and compatibly layer (first party WINE) I would buy a license - and then ignore the GUI.