Microsoft and Red Hat Team Up to Offer Linux on Azure Cloud
Microsoft said today that it will offer Red Hat's version of the open source Linux operating system on its Azure cloud computing platform. — The alliance, which will be detailed in a webcast later today …
Context & Ripple Effects
By late 2015, Microsoft had already been easing Linux into Azure at the edges — its Azure Machine Learning launch months earlier shipped with a Hadoop-based HDInsight tool that ran on Linux. The Red Hat alliance is a different order of move: it puts the dominant enterprise Linux distribution itself under official support inside a Windows-first cloud.
The partnership became the template for a decade of joint work between the two companies — from OpenShift on Azure as a jointly managed Kubernetes service in 2018, through Azure Arc extending management to servers and clusters on any infrastructure, to Microsoft eventually shipping its own open-source Azure Linux container host in 2023.
First-order effects
- Enterprises standardized on Red Hat Enterprise Linux gain certified support for running those workloads on Azure, removing the distro-switching cost that kept them on rival clouds or private data centers.
Second-order effects
- Red Hat gets a hyperscale channel for its subscriptions while Azure gets an enterprise-Linux credibility boost — a cooperation pattern the two extended into co-managed Kubernetes with OpenShift on Azure three years later.
Third-order effects
- Once Linux was a supported citizen rather than a tolerated guest, Microsoft moved down the stack to building its own open-source container host OS — signaling that the cloud platform, not any single operating system, is the product.
The trend: Enterprise clouds are absorbing open-source infrastructure from licensed guest to first-party building block, with vendor alliances like the Microsoft–Red Hat one marking each stage.