May 20, 2026
BlogMicrosoft To Make Azure Linux a Full Commercial Distribution
In a move some may find surprising — and others not so much — Microsoft plans to make Azure Linux 4.0 a full, commercially available Linux distribution optimized for Azure. Microsoft officials revealed their new plans for Azure Linux on May 18 at the Open Source Summit North America 2026. The company is enabling those interested in test-driving a public preview of it on Azure Virtual Machines to register their interest via a form.
Because everything announced by Microsoft these days is obligated to have an AI angle, Microsoft is positioning Azure Linux 4.0 and the companion Azure Container Linux as a “hardened Linux distribution purpose-built for cloud native and AI workloads.”
Directions on Microsoft had inklings that Microsoft may have been moving to make Azure Linux a full Linux distribution back in 2024. At that time, we noted that Microsoft had no direct competitor to Amazon Linux. And as of April 2024, Microsoft’s LinkedIn division was running an earlier version of Azure Linux internally as a replacement for Red Hat’s CentOS7.
When we asked Microsoft then if Azure Linux might be on its way to full Linux distribution status, a spokesperson told us “Azure Linux for VM or bare metal use is not available as a commercially supported offering today.”
Two Thirds of Azure Customer Cores Run Linux
Cut to 2026. Microsoft is still saying the majority (two-thirds) of customer cores in Azure run Linux (not Windows Server). Microsoft also says the platforms running Microsoft 365, GitHub and OpenAI’s ChatGPT “all sit on Linux foundations.” Microsoft has supported a wide variety of Linux distributions on Azure for years but never made its own available for commercial use by customers and partners prior to this week’s announcement.
In 2023, Microsoft rebranded its Common Base Linux (CBL)-Mariner distribution as “Azure Linux.” CBL-Mariner is Microsoft’s lightweight Linux distribution designed for Microsoft internal use only in its own first party services and edge-computing appliances. It is the base OS for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) container hosts, the base container OS in Azure Stack HCI (now known as Azure Local), and the graphical component of the Windows Subsystem for Linux.
Azure Linux 4.0 is derived from Fedora Linux, with Microsoft curating packages and supply-chain components for Azure. Azure Linux 4.0 will ship as a VM image, with Microsoft officials telling ZDNet that they plan to announce WSL images, as well. However, Microsoft also said there were no plans for Azure Linux 4.0 to be a desktop Linux with a graphical environment.
Azure Container Linux (ACL) is Flatcar Container Linux productized as a hardened, immutable container host that will supersede the AKS host OS based on Azure Linux 3.0.
Microsoft claims this will give developers a more consistent experience, but the move also shows how important and wide-used Linux is within all of Microsoft’s hosted services.
