Canonical, Microsoft Bring Ubuntu on Arm to Azure

Canonical and Microsoft today announced the general availability of Ubuntu images on Ampere Altra Arm-based Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines (VMs).

“These images provide the familiar Ubuntu experience, with an Azure-optimized kernel and configurations,” A new post to the Ubuntu blog explains. “Users will benefit from running the most popular operating system for public cloud, with one of the largest collections of Arm-based applications, on Azure’s secure, scalable, and highly cost-effective cloud infrastructure.”

Ampere Altra is a cloud-native Arm processor, and with Arm workloads known to work more efficiently than those based on traditional x86 architectures, this kind of advance most likely represents the future for most mainstream datacenters. But for now, Canonical notes that Arm-based architectures are ideal for computing workloads that include “microservices, application servers, Machine Learning (ML), open-source databases, and in-memory caches.”

Ampere Altra is also well suited for new use cases like Anbox Cloud, which allows organizations to run Android in the cloud securely and at scale, Canonical adds.

“Arm-based technologies are especially well suited to run modern scale-out and cloud-native workloads,” Microsoft vice president Paul Nash says. “We appreciate the close collaboration with Canonical, and we are thrilled to include the general availability of Ubuntu images for the Ampere Altra Arm-based VMs. Customers can now deploy production Linux workloads on the new Azure VMs.”

Microsoft notes that Canonical Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Debian are all available on the new Arm-based Azure VMs, and that it will also add support for Alma Linux and Rocky Linux in the future.