Linux and Open Source on Azure Quarterly Update – October 2024

Since our last update in July, there has been no shortage of new and exciting updates and news about Linux and open source on Azure. Find out more!

What’s new in Azure on Linux

AlmaLinux is available as an approved Linux distribution.

AlmaLinux, a popular alternative to CentOS Linux, has been available in the Azure Marketplace for over three years and is currently an approved Linux distribution on Azure. As an approved Linux distribution, AlmaLinux adheres to testing and update standards while also receiving the support described below. Microsoft’s Linux and Open Source Support Policy. Visit our blog Learn more

Linux promotional offers

We’re excited to share that we have a promotional offer for the latest Linux VMs on Azure. For a limited time, save an extra 15% on a 1-year Azure Reserved Virtual Machine (VM) instance on the latest Linux VMs. This means you can save up to 56% compared to running Azure VMs on a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) basis. This offer is available until March 31, 2025. For more information, see: blog and Terms of Use.

ED25519 SSH key support for Linux VMs (Generally Available)

ED25519 SSH key support for Linux VMs Now generally available on Azure, it provides customers with improved security and deployment efficiency on Azure. Customers can now choose between RSA and ED25519 based SSH keys.

Azure Cobalt 100-based virtual machine (generally available)

We recently announced general availability of new Azure Cobalt 100-based virtual machines. These VMs run on Microsoft’s first 64-bit Arm-based Azure Cobalt 100 CPUs, designed entirely in-house. It offers up to 50% better price performance than previous generation Arm-based VMs, making it an attractive option for a wide range of scale-out and cloud-native Linux-based workloads, including data analytics, web and application servers, and open. Source database, cache, etc. The new Azure Cobalt 100 VMs support a wide range of Linux distributions, including AlmaLinux, Azure Linux (via AKS), Debian, Flatcar Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, and more. Check out our blog To get more information.

Landing Zone for Red Hat Enterprise Linux

We developed a landing zone for RHEL on Azure, providing design recommendations and reference architectures to help support successful RHEL deployments. Azure landing zone serves as a blueprint for cloud success. read blog For more information

New guide to deploying open source software on Azure

On Azure, you can build and run applications using the open source software of your choice, including Linux and databases such as PostgreSQL and MySQL. To accelerate your journey with open source on Azure, we’ve developed an end-to-end guide for deploying open source software on a variety of workloads, including projects like KAITO, PostgreSQL, and Inspektor Gadget. read blog For more information

Azure Confidential VM with NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU (Generally Available)

We announced the general availability of confidential virtual machines (VMs) featuring NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs. These VMs are ideal for inferring, fine-tuning, or training small to medium-sized models such as Whisper, Stable Diffusion and their variants (SDXL, SSD), and language models such as Zephyr, Falcon, GPT2, MPT, Llama2, and Wizard. And Exwin. Ubuntu 24.04 is the available Linux OS for these VMs. Visit Blog For more information

What’s new in Azure and open source

Flatcar has been accepted to CNCF at the incubation level.

Flatcar has been approved by the CNCF at the incubation level, which indicates that the project is considered stable and will be used successfully in a production environment. This is an exciting milestone for the Flatcar project and the cloud native community! For more information, please read: Brendan Burns’ Blog and CNCF Blog.

Linux and open source events

Over the past few months, we’ve talked and interacted with other open source enthusiasts at several events: All systems go!, container days, Data and AI Master, DebConf24, Flock to Fedora 2024, FrOSCon, Linux Security Summit, Open Source Summit Europe, Red Hat Summit Connect, Ubuntu SummitAnd more. If you missed the Microsoft session or want to check it out again, you can watch some recordings.

What happens next?

Microsoft Ignite 2024

Microsoft Ignite Coming to the Windy City (Chicago) this year from November 19th to 22nd! Whether you join in person or virtually, don’t miss one of our Linux and open source sessions.

You can also connect and attend sessions at: formula and red hatWe are a major partner of Ignite.

Upcoming Linux and Open Source Events

we will be next time KubeCon North America In Salt Lake City! Check out one of our Microsoft sessions and see us at our booth.

• accession Cloud Native Denial (hosted/sponsored by Microsoft)
• accession The day before AKS

Bonus Content

• Read about our LinkedIn journey. To migrate most of your assets to Azure Linux
• Check out this guest blog post: Hear from Jehudi Castro, Director of Public Cloud Alliances at Canonical, about how Canonical and Azure are working together to improve security, operational efficiency, and performance in the cloud using Linux and open source software.

If you have any feedback or questions, please leave a comment. We’d love to hear from you!