Back when Microsoft acquired Hotmail, a horde of software specialists were tasked with porting this platform to Windows. After burning the one or other fortune on this project, they finally gave up. Hotmail kept running on Linux until they killed it.
In a similar approach to Fedora CoreOS, Azure Linux only has the basic packages needed to support and run containers. Common Linux tools are used to add packages and manage security updates. Updates are offered either as RPM packages or as complete disk images that can be deployed as needed. Using RPM allows adding custom packages to a base Azure Linux image to support additional features and services as needed. Notable features include an iptables-based firewall, support for signed updates, and a hardened kernel.
Microsoft’s been pretty open about using Linux for at least the past decade or so.
They kept building it into Windows which eventually resulted in WSL, largely because they use Linux servers but Windows workstations.
It was about 5 years ago that they publicly released Common Base Linux Mariner (now called Azure Linux).
Back when Microsoft acquired Hotmail, a horde of software specialists were tasked with porting this platform to Windows. After burning the one or other fortune on this project, they finally gave up. Hotmail kept running on Linux until they killed it.
Naturally, I could look it up, but what is Azure Linux?
Is it a fork of RHEL? Cloud Linux? FreeBSD?
Edit: Here it is.