14 DAY TRIAL // Today, December 2, 2015, Microsoft, through Stephen Zarkos, Senior Program Manager, Azure, has had the great pleasure of announcing the availability of the Debian GNU/Linux open-source operating system on its award-winning Azure cloud computing platform.
After offering support for the world's most popular free operating system, Ubuntu Linux, Microsoft has now decided that it was time to endorse more GNU/Linux distributions, and why not start with Debian, which is the base OS for Ubuntu? Debian GNU/Linux is one of the most recognized free operating systems in the Linux community, and it comes with support for 64-bit and 32-bit hardware architectures, as well as over 43,000 packages.
"Microsoft is very excited to bring Debian, one of the mainstream Linux distributions, to our family of endorsed and supported open source solutions in Microsoft Azure," says Michael Kelley, Principal Program Manager with the Microsoft’s Open Source Technology Center. "With this announcement, we continue building strong ties with the open source ecosystem, including communities and partners such as credativ."
Debian 7 and Debian 8 are now supported
At the time of writing this article, Microsoft has announced that its Azure cloud computing platform supports both the Debian GNU/Linux 7 (Wheezy) and Debian GNU/Linux 8 (Jessie) operating systems. Thus, it allows its customers to provision Debian-based virtual machines based on one of the supported Debian point releases via the Azure Marketplace, as you can see from the attached screenshot on the right, or through the images in the Azure Resource Manager templates.
Microsoft had already provided its customers with support for Debian GNU/Linux in Hyper-V 2012 R2, but now it committed to support the award-winning free operating system across its public cloud platforms, including but not limited to PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC), Azure Site Recovery, Microsoft Operations Management Suite, as well as System Center suite.