Nearly 1 in 3 Azure virtual machines now run Linux

Linux is steadily increasing its dominance on Microsoft Azure. During his keynote at DockerCon in Seattle this week, Mark Russinovich CTO of Microsoft Azure said that the share of Azure virtual machines running Linux rose from 1:4 to nearly 1:3 in the past year.

In a blog post discussing Microsoft’s container innovations, Russinovich cited a Forrester report, saying that “…over forty percent of CIOs view adoption of open source technologies as critical for them in the next year – primarily because of low cost, avoidance of vendor lock-in and agility. And that same North Bridge study saw use of OSS increased sixty-five percent over same companies surveyed from previous year.”

With customer demand to run Linux on Azure cloud very much in mind, Microsoft has been ramping efforts to bring Linux players to its cloud. The company already partners with SUSE and Canonical and they even cozied up with the arch-rival Red Hat.

Microsoft also made some interesting choices to cater to the customers running Linux on Azure cloud. In April, Microsoft announced a collaboration with Canonical to bring Bash shell to Windows 10 so developers can run Linux tools, utilities and commands natively on Windows.

At DockerCon, Russinovich demoed new capabilities of Microsoft technologies for Docker containers. He gave a preview of Azure Container Service (ACS), that’s based on open source container orchestration technology, Apache Mesos and Mesosphere DCOS. ACS used Docker Swarm for orchestration and now supports both Linux and Windows Server. “We’ve also built Docker support into tools and extensions like the cross-platform Visual Studio Code editor, enhancing the Docker experience for every developer,” wrote Russinovich in his blog post.

During DockerCon, Russinovich also gave a demo of SQL Server running on Linux, in a Docker container. He also said that those who are participating in private previews can use SQL Server on Ubuntu as a docker image.