I’m quite excited at the Linux love coming from Windows Azure. It's not only cool, but makes a whole lot of sense in this heterogeneous world we live in:

  1. It makes sense that if you’re using a IaaS cloud provider that they offer a diverse set of operating systems to choose from.
  2. It’s the right thing to do because the Cloud should be open and offer choice.
  3. At the end of the day it makes trouble shooting and getting the job done easier in the day to day build-out, maintenance and optimization of the solutions we put our blood sweat (and often tears) in.

Windows Azure currently supports the following Linux distributions:

  • Open SUSE 12.1
  • SLES 11 SP2
  • CentOS 6.2
  • Ubuntu 12.04

You can create a Virtual Machine Running Linux in Azure quite easily from the Image Gallery in the Windows Azure Management Portal. There’s a cool step by step guide here.

This is great, but what if you want to use your own virtual machine from a supported Linux distribution? Not a problem… in Azure its easy to provision! Here’s a helpful little article titled “Creating and Uploading a Virtual Hard Disk that Contains the Linux Operating System” that steps you through here.

Most of my customers run Windows and Linux to do amazing things. Sometimes they use it separately, and sometimes they work together to build something really amazing. Azure is making it easier for us to do so with Linux Support in Azure.

If you want to know more about Microsoft and Openness check the latest here.