Ms Heart Linux 770px

With the growing popularity of Open Source, Microsoft is following the customers and the ecosystem - but pragmatic investment in Linux doesn't diminish the company's commitment to Windows.

 

'Microsoft and Linux' should be a phrase we're used to hearing by now. Microsoft is a member of not only the Linux Foundation but also the Linux kernel security mailing list (a rather more select community). Microsoft is submitting patches to the Linux kernel "to create a complete virtualisation stack with Linux and Microsoft hypervisor". And when Microsoft wanted to add container support to Windows, it picked an open-source specification designed originally for Linux rather than the internal Windows-centric implementation it had already written.

Now Azure customers get the same hybrid benefits for Linux support contracts as they do for Windows Server licences; Windows runs Linux binaries; some key Microsoft applications are available on Linux; and new services might be built with Linux. That's not just the obvious ones like the Azure Kubernetes Service: Microsoft Tunnel -- the VPN replacement for iOS and Android apps connecting to corporate resources on-premises through Azure AD -- installs as a Docker container on a Linux server.