Microsoft Announces Azure Linux 4.0 and Release of Azure Container Linux

At the Open Source Summit North America this week, Microsoft announced two major milestones for Linux workloads on Azure: Azure Linux 4.0 running on Azure virtual machines and the general availability of Azure Container Linux, an immutable, container-optimized, Linux-based OS.

“Open source is the foundation for AI and, as AI workloads scale, developers need that foundation to be more secure, more predictable, and easier to build apps and agents,” Microsoft Technical Fellow Brendan Burns writes. “Azure Linux 4.0 and Azure Container Linux give developers and organizations a hardened Linux distribution purpose-built for cloud native and AI workloads.”

Burns delivered a keynote address at the conference in which he discussed how the next evolution of open source is the move from cloud-native to AI-native workflows. As he notes, over two-thirds of the customer cores in Azure today run Linux, with ChatGPT scaling across over 10 million compute cores and serving billions of queries each day.

Azure Linux 4.0 and Azure Container Linux are secure by default, Microsoft says, with reduced package footprints, consistent performance characteristics, and a smaller attack surface. These systems are developed in the open, and changes are contributed upstream so that the work hardening Azure Linux benefits the broader ecosystem too.

If you’re interested in trying Azure Linux 4.0, you can sign up for a public preview on the Microsoft website. And while Azure Container Linux is now GA, Microsoft says there will be a broader rollout during Build on June 2.