I would have assumed Ubuntu, given that they've partnered with them a few times, "deb" is the default Linux download for Edge/Linux, Ubuntu seems to be the default distro for WSL, etc. Surprised it's RedHat based.
Nah, the single biggest customer is the US Government, and the US Government buys Red Hat. I mean, Uncle Sam will forego machine learning optimizations that ship out of the box in Ubuntu and thus walk away from entire product lines simply because Red Hat has a better STIG. There was no way Microsoft was going to risk that.
This is a distro intended for 1P internal services. Azure heavily uses Ubuntu internally compared to RHEL. Personally I’m curious to see how adoption turns out, because I think you’re right and this would be more likely something customers pick up.
(I work in Azure)
I don't suppose you could tell us what 1P stands for? Top Google hit for Azure 1P is.. this Github repo, followed by the Azure Pricing page then hundreds of sunglasses sales.
First party
1p - first party, meaning other Microsoft teams
STIG?
Security Technical Implementation Guides
I always figured Microsoft partnered with Ubuntu because their saw Red Hat as their real competitor.
Kind of like how Walmart uses Azure instead of AWS.
Ubuntu is what users want (where "want" is a rather loaded term, it's just the most accessible version for most folks at the moment). Not what enterprise businesses want to resell.