Microsoft Adds Intel's Clear Linux Open-Source OS To Azure Market

JG0LD quotes a report from Network World: Microsoft announced today that it has added support for the Intel-backed Clear Linux distribution in instances for its Azure public cloud platform. It's the latest in a lengthy string of Linux distributions to become available on the company's Azure cloud. BrianFagioli adds from BetaNews: In other words, users of the company's cloud platform can set up a virtual machine using this distribution in addition to existing Linux-based operating systems. "Today, we're excited to announce the availability of Clear Linux OS for Intel Architecture in Azure Marketplace. Clear Linux OS is a free, open-source Linux distribution built from the ground up for cloud and data center environments and tuned to maximize the performance and value of Intel architecture. Microsoft Azure is the first public cloud provider to offer Clear Linux, and we're really excited about what it means for Linux users in the cloud and the community at large," says Jose Miguel Parrella, Open Source Product Manager, Microsoft.

Anyone use it?

[Billly Gates]

Of course this is someone who runs FreeBSD off of Azure :-)

Oddly I find FreeBSD the best non MS on their cloud and on Hyper-V while Linux seems better on Amazon

Re:

[unixisc]

Any reason Microsoft picked Intel's chosen distro, as opposed to one from Oracle, Debian, Red Hat or Suse?

What is Azure's native OS? If it's not FreeBSD, how do you run FreeBSD off it?

Re:Anyone use it?

[Gadget_Guy]

Any reason Microsoft picked Intel's chosen distro, as opposed to one from Oracle, Debian, Red Hat or Suse?

This is one of those RTFA moments. They are adding Intel's distro to their selection. It is not the only one. From the article:

Microsoft already supports CentOS, CoreOS, Debian, Oracle Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu in Azure instances.

The operating system that run Azure is actually called Microsoft Azure. It is specifically designed to run virtual machines and other cloud services.

Re:

[Billly Gates]

Azure was originally it's own operating system that was distributed based. The MS Server team didn't like it so that is no longer the case .... gotta love politics :-)

Today Azure is based off of Windows Server 2012 R2 and Hyper-V but is a cousin much like Windows 8.1 and Server 2012 R2 are based off the same exact kernel and most services but have additional tools, api's, and tuning. Their virtualizer is a cousin of Hyper-V too from what I read but is different. The VM tools are identical between the 2 as

no thanks

[FudRucker]

i will stick with slackware, and keep an eye on the other surviving non-systemd distros

Linux OS tuned for Intel hardware on emulated hdwr

[Locutus]

Are not Cloud VM's isolating and emulating hardware so to what end is running Intel's hardware tuned Linux on MS Azure of any benefit?

Directly on the iron might seem interesting but then I wonder what's the difference compared to say Gentoo.

Microsoft and Intel have lots of money so we get a press release I guess.

LoB

Re:

[mccalli]

They're not emulating, they're virtualising. Direct passthrough to the hardware via a hypervisor API is possible, so it's possible that there is advantage to running an Intel-tuned VM on an Intel hardware platform.

Re:

[Locutus]

ah, that's right since they added VM hardware to the x86 CPU's about 10 or so years ago. Thanks for the clarification. I guess I've been doing too much ARM development recently.

Re:

[John Allsup]

They're not emulated. They are confined by hardware virtualisation (which is in many ways like another tier of process memory protection). Virtualised apps run on the bare metal processor, just as userland processes do. The only difference is that the kernel the userland processes on a virtualised host sees is also like a userland process, so far as the bare-metal processor is concerned.

Re:

[Locutus]

thanks, I'd forgot about the virtualization mechanisms added to the x86 CPUs over the past few years.

LoB

Clear Linux, not to be confused with...

[TodPunk]

Not to be confused with https://www.clearos.com/ [clearos.com] the rebranded of Clark Connect distro.

Microsoft Supporting Linux

[Merk42]

Obivously this is EEE!!

Everything Microsoft does is evil, even when they do the things we chastised them for not doing before!

Is providing a link too much to ask?

[Anon E. Muss]

Neither of TFA's or the /. summary provide a link to Clear Linux. WTF?!?!

Here it is: https://clearlinux.org/ [clearlinux.org]

I get why sites like Network World and BetaNews avoid linking to the subject of their articles. Heaven forbid a reader click the link and leave their site, possibly never to return! Won't somebody please think about the advertisers! Reasonable financial motives for bad behavior doesn't change the fact that it's bad behavior.