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Three years ago, Mark Russinovich, CTO of the Microsoft Azure Cloud, announced that one in four Azure instances was running on Linux. By 2017, that number had risen to forty percent. Today, Microsoft reports that about half of its instances run on Linux, making it the most popular operating system on Azure.

Scott Guthrie, the executive vice president of Microosft’s cloud and enterprise group, reported in an interview that about half of the Azure VMs are currently running on Linux, even if it changes day by day because a lot of the workloads are flexible. A little later, Microsoft reported that about half of the Azure VMs are Linux.

Practical decision

This means that Windows Server is not the most popular, while Microsoft developed it for its cloud offerings. But not only Azure users use Linux more than ever. Microsoft also embraces the system according to Guthrie. Native Azure services often run on Linus. Microsoft is building more of those services. For example, Azures Software Defined Network (SDN) is based on Linux. And there are more projects like that. Look at our simultaneous release of SQL Server on Linux. All our projects now run on Linux, according to Guthrie.

That fits in with the words of Russinovich, who, according to ZDNet, noted a few years ago that Microsoft switched to Azure because it is a practical business decision. This is because many customers simply want to use Linux. Since Microsoft is essentially a service provider, it simply gives customers what they want.

We talk to customers who specifically want Linux. Then we give them that, according to CTO of Data, Raghu Ramakrishnan. If you want MySQL, then we give you MySQL. If you want NoSQL, we’ll give you NoSQL. This means that you have to be part of open source, and open source is by definition part of the wider community.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.