Microsoft's Azure Linux | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's Azure Linux

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66 pointsAbuAssar109 comments

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!

Why RPM and not DEB or something more modern? Is it for Read Had compatibility?

It was initially based on deb in the earlier iterations of its life, but ultimately, we decided to use Fedora as a base as a good balance between stability and new feature enablement.

That decision also makes it easier for us to contribute to Fedora upstream and collab with others, for example AWS uses Fedora for the base of Amazon Linux too, so there may be ways we can work together to solve common problems. I'm not making any future/promise statements with that comment. My point is, we are happy to collab upstream, using real open-source, community pathways.

I've created and managed five distributions for two companies. I've found RPM to have slightly easier tooling across the whole stack, from developers building individual RPMs/specs up through building and managing 1000s of RPMs across multiple releases. The Fedora build model makes a great reference and source of tools for spinning your own distributions.

My experience over the years with a few Linux distributions is that rpm based distros always seem to give me more problems with dependencies and always seems harder to fix. These days I much prefer deb based distributions, mainly Ubuntu as I like their trade-off between stability and newer versions though I'm not a fan of snap packages.

Is this available for wsl? Is there there a site that documents what packedges are available? Is this purely a cli distro or does it have a graphical environment?

It is not published in the store yet for WSL, but you can use it in WSL using the instructions here: https://github.com/microsoft/azurelinux/issues/10997

There is no graphical environment, but you could probably pull that off with some tinkering. Well maybe not some, maybe a lot, but its not impossible. You can build/install anything just like any other distro.

Not even at gunpoint would I choose Azure as my cloud provider but great for Linux

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.

Would love to hear more about your frustration and how it can be fixed. Message me at my nick @microsoft.com please.

Thanks, sorry for my tone yesterday. It was the end of a long frustrating work day.

Azure Linux does look interesting, thank you for working on it. Fedora is a great choice as a base image. Having a Fedora based distro designed to work well with WSL would be amazing! As a base image for apps though I'm curious how you manage the 6month release cycle. Are you planning on expended support, or would people using it need to upgrade every 6 months. I think the appeal of a Debian base is we only need to think about big upgrades every 2 years.

A few bits of Azure feedback I can think of now. Probably not directly related to what you work on, but just some of my experiences working with Azure for the last year.

1. The CLI is good, I think maintaining feature parity between the CLI and portal is really helpful and allows us to integrate with our internal infra more easily. Azure CLI is really the best part working with the service.

2. The management portal is really flaky. Like unknown error messages pop up when clicking on deployment logs. Sometimes the SSH or log tail functions just don't load at all and overall the experience just feels sluggish. I'm really not sure what can be done about this but I've been moving to the CLI just because the web interface is frustrating to work with.

3. The Microsoft documentation is really verbose and difficult to navigate in my opinion. Like we were looking in to hosting a Teams bot and those docs are full of emoji and full page articles like 'why did we make an SDK?'. I have to jump around several pages to get to what I need and even then the code examples in the docs are not actually in sync with the current version of the SDK library. It feels like AI was just set loose to write as much as possible. I think the problem is the information density of much of the documentation is very low. Maybe that's something that can be addressed going forward.

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.

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.

I have worked with AWS, Google and Azure. Google Cloud has the worst UI of them, it slow, broken and just horrible. UI in AWS may be faster than Azure, but overal layout and organization feels a lot better in Azure. I would strongly recommend clearly separating builds from deployments, if you don't want bad surprises. In the age of containers there should really be no difference in how, where or what you deploy.

pro tip: build a VM in azure and run your management portal from there. I find it a lot more reliable

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.

We've been through the big three, starting with AWS, then GCP and now Azure. I long for the days of AWS and GCP.

Neat. What can we do better?

“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.

When I said "we" I meant the group of folks who work on and care about Linux and open source at Microsoft and in a position to help affect change that comes in via feedback from the community.

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?

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.

But it's true. Microsoft's reputation is in the toilet. After everything from the ICC sanctions to the AI spam in Windows to this month's Patch Tuesday incident, everyone knows to avoid Microsoft products like their life depends on it.

But if you want an actionable idea here's one: make it a hundred times cheaper, or free. People use Oracle Cloud because it's free, even though Oracle is even worse than Microsoft. If you want people to use it, you know what to do.

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.

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...

You have a core team member of the Azure Linux group invite you to ask/tell them what you want to see in what they are working on and this is what you choose to say? Smh

They referred to Microsoft’s known practice of embrace, extend, extinguish a “conspiracy theory” in a sibling thread, so they’ve essentially lost credibility. I don’t think genuine feedback is going anywhere useful.

i said that tongue-in-cheek lol

he will take your concerns directly to satya microsoft himself

I would have to write a book on it, but start with allowing people to create an azure account for an organization without having to buy O365. I kid you not I had to find a sidedoor portal in a Reddit post to do it otherwise it's simply not possible.

Every interaction with Azure is a pain. Just 3 weeks ago I was trying to use Artifact Signing, after spending one hour on outdated doc on how to set it up I get hit with Identity validation. I did all steps and still "in progress" still to this day. You charge 40$/month for "support" on Microsoft Q&A which we all know is a joke otherwise its 100USD just to get a ticket in to know why your process is so broken.

At this point I get better support on GCP which is telling.

Nothing new,this is meant for their cloud Linux boxes.

Not meant to replace windows 11 as others are suggesting

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).

Conceding superiority to Linux would make them a computing philosophy leader.

If left at that. More likely to committee infect in reality.

Ask a very simple question: how would this generate profits, which high level manager would be motivated to do this? Sure, 15-20 years ago corporations would've made vanity/critics-industry appeasing projects like this out of pride alone. Those times are over.

To answer all the comments in this thread at once, and this is my personal opinion, building a distro is easy, releasing a distro and supporting customers that use it is much harder.

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...

> Another thing you may have noticed is that the taskmgr or even regedit does not look the same as you would see on Windows 11. This is because as I mentioned, Cloud Host is built on OneCore and it is headless (or console based), hence, it doesn’t contain any of the GUI pieces of Windows. We have a special taskmgr and regedit version that doesn’t link with all the modern GUI functionality available in Windows 11, which gives them the “old style” look.

I haven't used Windows in a long time, so it looked normal to me. I just went and watched a video on Windows 11, goodness me.

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.

Wasn't part of one of the big lawsuits 30 years ago that Microsoft could not market a UNIX derivative?

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

Ahh yeah I remember that one now.

IIRC SCO's claim was flawed as they didn't produce the infringing code and doubly flawed as they didn't even own the right to the Unix code.

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

Interesting question. I remember M/S sold or spun off Xenix, but I thought that was due to them wanting to focus on DOS and Windows.

Found this and the answer is "no" :) Seems they rid of it due to Bell Labs breakup, see "Transfer of ownership to SCO":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix

Yeah, it was before the bigger antitrust suits but IIRC it was part of what set the stage for them

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?

we do work and collaborate in fedora upstream. the reason for having a separate distro is to serve a different audience. there are several things to balance like life/supportability cycle, hardware enablement vs. legacy work, etc.

How many Microsoft employees are working on Azure Linux in 2026 (full-time equivalents)? Github Project Page lists ~ 195 contributors today.

Is Azure Linux relying on community contributions, and MS employees do not write code, justt review, plan, coordinate? Or is it the other way around, Microsoft developers do most of the work, and occasionally accept a small PR and interesting feature requests from the community, here and there?

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

While I agree Windows 11 is abysmal, Azure Linux is nothing new.

Azure has been using Linux from the beginning.

Genuine question: Is Azure a giant Kubernetes cluster?

> now

This has been true from day 1.

As you saw the repo has been around for quite some time.

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.

Are you speaking on behalf of Microsoft?

i'm speaking on behalf of myself. While yes, this was true back in then day, that is very much not the philosophy nowadays. it's a different company with different leadership than those days.

Speaking as an ex-MSFT employee who was there during the "new leadership" transition, the new leadership is not any less sociopathic than the old one. I'll give you that Satya is more charismatic so he can hide it better than Ballmer, but that only makes it worse.

Are you really claiming the US-DoJ are conspiracy theorists?

Now it is. In the late 90s/early 00s it wasn’t. MS is quite different today from what it was back then.

The MS of today is actively reaping the benefits of the EEE & openly shady business years.

Their behavioural changes can be framed as an intentional reformation, but also as exhausting high-value targets, losing monopolies, and settling into profitable equilibrium out of necessity.

Modern competitors to MS are effectively immune to MS-EEE, in some cases by being way better at every aspect of it (MS IE is now delivered by Google based on forked Apple tech, and Office uses React, for quick examples…). MS pivoted to Azure-entanglements for their entrenched customers, which remains highly profitable, but have also had a marked decrease in engineering clout in certain key areas and still have a fragmented client/GUI ecosystem.

I’d contend they haven’t changed, they’re just cornered in ways they never were before so we see different behaviour. If MS controlled iOS or Facebook or WebKit or Search we’d see more classic plays reminding us who owns what.

You shouldn’t be posting replies like this on a public forum if you’re actually a MS employee.

i should have added an lol to the end of this

You wanna take a look at the age of those commits again?

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.

Where is the downvote button? Remember: it's EEE all the way.

Torvalds wept.

nah, he loves it.

Torvalds is a huge supporter of tivoization and thinks the GPLv3 was a mistake.

The John11:35 allusion appears to have escaped everyone. Oh well.

oh ha ok.

yeah, not a big follower of that kind of literature.

damn when did this come out?

Pandemic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azure_Linux

Panzure!

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.

i used to call myself a "cloud engineer" 14 years ago, me and a friend developed a formal way to deploy thin clients using AWS as the host, and it worked well for everything including youtube videos. this was in 2009, we had both been working with AWS since the first "public" instances became available.

So i suppose when azure was announced and came out, i was acutely aware of what they offered, and it was, you know, marginally cheaper than the AWS windows servers, as azure didn't have to pay microsoft as much for DCE licenses, maybe.

But it makes sense they have Linux now, as i said, ecosystem lock-in...

> based on Debian

Are you sure about that? Everything I can find now and from when it was first covered suggests that it's an RPM based "distro" (let's not argue about whether it's technically a distro).

The TomsHardware article you linked to in turns links to ZDNet which in turn links to an InfoWorld article (isn't modern reposted rehashed "news" slop just fucking delightful) about the "release" of CBL-Mariner notes that it was created as a replacement to the then-recently-deprecated RedHat CoreOS, and references that (at the time) MS had a deal with a company that was supporting a CoreOS fork.

Given those two factors, it isn't impossible but it seems hard to believe that they would use a Debian base but then Frankenstein RPM package manage into it.

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.

No.

Amazon wasn’t even a twinkle in its father’s eye.

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.

Didn't Microsoft throw SCO some bones to help sue linux vendors?

Heres a hasty link to an article about it https://www.techmonitor.ai/technology/microsoft_offered_to_u...

> Much less there was no war.

Did people pick up literal guns and fight each other with literal bullets over Linux/Microsoft?

No of course not. Even most American nerds aren't deranged.

Did Microsoft do everything it could to try and kill Linux, and the concept of OSS in general? You bet your fucking ass they did.

> Microsoft sued Lindows for infringement and won. After the rename to Linspire Microsoft actually worked with them on compatibility.

Holy revisionist history batman.

This isn't exactly fucking hard to find

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Lindows.com....

> As early as 2002, a court rejected Microsoft's claims, stating that Microsoft had used the term "windows" to describe graphical user interfaces before the product, Windows, was ever released, and the windowing technique had already been implemented by Xerox and Apple many years before.[4] Microsoft kept seeking retrial, but in February 2004, a judge rejected two of Microsoft's central claims.[5] The judge denied Microsoft's request for a preliminary injunction and raised "serious questions" about Microsoft's trademark. Microsoft feared a court may define "Windows" as generic and result in the loss of its status as a trademark.

> In July 2004, Microsoft offered to settle with Lindows.[6] As part of this licensing settlement, Microsoft paid an estimated US$20,000,000 (equivalent to $33,294,574 in 2024), and Lindows transferred the Lindows trademark to Microsoft and changed their name to Linspire.

> completely contrived by some fans of Linux

I mean there are absolutely some fanboy fantasies of grandeur here but I don't think it's the "fans of Linux" who are delusional mate.

I'm not sure why you jumped to the conclusion that meant a literal war. Of course there was no literal war. And Microsoft did not do everything it could kill Linux and OSS. That is some serious revisionist history. Instead of speaking in generalities like "Microsoft hates Linux" maybe use actual examples and facts.

I'm not sure why you say that's revisionist, your quotes line up with what I said.

Appreciate you calling me delusional for not echoing vague statements to make an OS a victim.

> I'm not sure why you say that's revisionist, your quotes line up with what I said.

What you said:

> Microsoft sued Lindows for infringement and won.

What actually happened:

> Microsoft feared a court may define "Windows" as generic and result in the loss of its status as a trademark

> Microsoft offered to settle with Lindows

> Microsoft paid an estimated US$20,000,000

How is taking someone to court for trademark infringement, and then resorting to paying them $20M dollars to settle because the Judge is about to invalidate your trademark "winning"?

> ...Lindows transferred the Lindows trademark to Microsoft and changed their name to Linspire.

You left out that part. This is a really dumb battle of semantics though and a derailment of the topic.

I didn't leave that part out. I literally quoted that in the previous comment.

That completely glosses over the actual behaviour of Microsoft, and ignoring the kinds of career, business, project, and reputational damage those tactics did.

MS’s attacks on open source, open formats, and free software impacted and still impact democracies, developing nations, general computing capabilities, and create vast market inefficiencies. Looking at it as pure tech misses the forest for the trees. The corruption of the Office OpenXml process alone is a daily pox on the developing world. The tax impact of those entanglements is recurrent, and frequently hurts education and healthcare.

Also: if someone got burnt by some industry jerks and have had to deal with the fallout for decades, “it was 20 years ago” completely misstates the problem. Some BS was started 20 years ago, sure, but with daily crap-bowls that needed to be eaten every day in between. Entire careers have fallen into those cracks, armies of IT staff forced into suboptimal and broken workflows to satisfy decisions based on establishing and abusing monopolies.

Breaking a spine, even years and years ago, impacts the every day. Bitterness can be well deserved with an understanding of what was lost.

You're just throwing out a lot of vague statements. You're not helping your case. What specifically did Microsoft do to open source, open format and free software? You're making some huge accusations that Microsoft made some decision that impacts democracies today. Such as?

How is Open OfficeXML a daily pox? Why not use ODF if it's such a disease?

Fallout from what exactly? Again this vague language is not helpful. What exactly was lost 20 years ago?

Both are Fedora/Red Hat based.

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