Hey! 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!
Having 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).
As for the US, having the laws on the books appropriately applied, resulting in a breaking up of the company would make me much more likely to opt for Azure.
For the remaining 96% of the world population that isn't the US, there's not much you can do, as the ICC case shows you to be an adversary. You'd have to show through big actions that you no longer are one.
I'm sure someone wants to reply "why so aggressive, they're doing their best, they don't have anything to do with the above". Almost certainly someone who wouldn't write this if I were replying to a Flock, ClearView, Paragon [0] or Palantir employee on here, despite Microsoft realistically being a much bigger societal threat - and top enabler of the former companies - in every way imaginable.
“We” feels a little insincere when you’re speaking on behalf of such a large corporation. I’m sure the comment had more to do with weaknesses of Azure as a whole rather than your team’s piece.
My 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.
Don't forget the part where blades will often be different from what's described in the docs, because Microsoft loves changing/renaming shit for no reason.
I do have to give them credit. The cli is pretty good. And Azure Storage Explorer is probably the best Microsoft app I’ve ever used. So props to the team who made that.
Just doesn’t match my experience at all. AWS isnsuper complex but stuff works. GCP has clearly the nicest interface but not every feature that AWS has. Azure is complex, slow, hard to use and incredibly opaque. No way I’ll use it again out of my own free will.
If 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?
It 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.
i 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.
It'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.
Hey! 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!
Having 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).
Wasn't part of one of the big lawsuits 30 years ago that Microsoft could not market a UNIX derivative?
I mean Microsoft actually had a quite successful UNIX derivative named Xenix in the 80s (later sold to SCO).
Right, that was mentioned in the case IIRC; they didn't want that to happen again
How is Linux a Unix derivative apart from some guy in Finland reading a sysV syscall manual in 1990?
I don't think SCO's claim ever got adjudicated but it was enough to let them shake down multiple companies
Not even at gunpoint would I choose Azure as my cloud provider but great for Linux
Neat. What can we do better?
There's quite a bit you could do better.
As for the US, having the laws on the books appropriately applied, resulting in a breaking up of the company would make me much more likely to opt for Azure.
For the remaining 96% of the world population that isn't the US, there's not much you can do, as the ICC case shows you to be an adversary. You'd have to show through big actions that you no longer are one.
I'm sure someone wants to reply "why so aggressive, they're doing their best, they don't have anything to do with the above". Almost certainly someone who wouldn't write this if I were replying to a Flock, ClearView, Paragon [0] or Palantir employee on here, despite Microsoft realistically being a much bigger societal threat - and top enabler of the former companies - in every way imaginable.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/02/trump-immigr...
“We” feels a little insincere when you’re speaking on behalf of such a large corporation. I’m sure the comment had more to do with weaknesses of Azure as a whole rather than your team’s piece.
seriously, there is a huge issue with reputation and trust.
after what has happened with consumer products, how can anybody be sure its not going to happen on the server side?
In the last few months, this place is turning into Slashdot 2.0. So you're going to encounter people still seething about the 1990s.
Not be Microsoft, mostly.
you know feedback is being requested, you could put a little more quality into it, pretend they dont know what has ever been said about them before.
pretend your a manager, and you have to approach an employee about thier hygiene.
I can't believe it is that bad!
My 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.
Ditch the VScode virus before it hurts. LLM based action infiltration will rise in 2026 but rest assured, that doesn't work in NeoVIM/VIM.
For sure, I don’t use VSCode and that’s part of what makes Azure so hard to use. All their stuff is built to support VSCode first.
Don't forget the part where blades will often be different from what's described in the docs, because Microsoft loves changing/renaming shit for no reason.
I like working with the cli instead of the portal. But even the cli is clunky.
I do have to give them credit. The cli is pretty good. And Azure Storage Explorer is probably the best Microsoft app I’ve ever used. So props to the team who made that.
Would love to hear more about your frustration and how it can be fixed. Message me at my nick @microsoft.com please.
It isn't.
I have done projects across Azure, AWS and GCP, and without a doubt would always pick Azure.
AWS is a master in complexity, one almost requires a PhD in cloud infrastructure to make sense of how everything works.
GCP is the usual "talk to the bots" when something happens, unless it gets escalated.
Azure can be as complicated as AWS, or one can enjoy the nice GUI tooling similar in spirit to VS or InteliJ like confort.
Even for timesharing like workflows with a cloud shell and Web IDE, it appears AWS and GCP take pride on being a clunky bad experience.
Just doesn’t match my experience at all. AWS isnsuper complex but stuff works. GCP has clearly the nicest interface but not every feature that AWS has. Azure is complex, slow, hard to use and incredibly opaque. No way I’ll use it again out of my own free will.
Well then we have to agree to disagree, I will keep Azure on top of my list, AWS second and GCP last.
Nothing new,this is meant for their cloud Linux boxes.
Not meant to replace windows 11 as others are suggesting
Is Azure running its hypervisors on Linux these days? I read awhile back that they were switching from Windows
No. It’s still very much Hyper-V running a custom build of what you can call windows underneath.
It is called Azure Host OS.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windowsosplatform/a...
It 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.
If 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?
I 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.
even microsoft knows better than to use windows for infrastructure.
qemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom AzureLinux-3.0-x86_64.iso -boot d -m 2048
Even Microsoft is betting on Linux now. No wonder given Win11 not being popular! :D
Azure has been using Linux from the beginning.
Genuine question: Is Azure a giant Kubernetes cluster?
While I agree Windows 11 is abysmal, Azure Linux is nothing new.
You wanna take a look at the age of those commits again?
The strategy "Embrace, extend and extinguish" by Microsoft even has its own Wikipedia page.
Conspiracy theory
It 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.
You shouldn’t be posting replies like this on a public forum if you’re actually a MS employee.
Now it is. In the late 90s/early 00s it wasn’t. MS is quite different today from what it was back then.
Are you speaking on behalf of Microsoft?
Are you really claiming the US-DoJ are conspiracy theorists?
> now
This has been true from day 1.
As you saw the repo has been around for quite some time.
Where is the downvote button? Remember: it's EEE all the way.
damn when did this come out?
Technically, 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-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-mar...
i 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.
>> 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.
Pandemic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azure_Linux
Panzure!
This is the most absurd news I have read in a while. I for one welcome our new open source overlords.
How is this different from Amazon Linux - the base for EC2/etc?
Does amazon make an OS like Windows? Did Amazon wage a multi year long war against Linux and the open source philosophy in its history?
Linux for their respective cloud resources. Neither is intended to really be a public distro.
It'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.
No.
Amazon wasn’t even a twinkle in its father’s eye.
Both are Fedora/Red Hat based.