Microsoft announces first Technical Preview of Azure Stack with Ubuntu

The cloud is about choice, portability and scale. I believe it is important for every element of the cloud ecosystem to support and expand both. Ubuntu is a critical part of delivering on choice for the cloud by supplying a consistent Ubuntu experience to developers and user regardless on which public or private cloud they run their workloads. There is only one cloud, it is a hybrid cloud that is composed of public clouds, like Azure and private clouds, like OpenStack and now Azure Stack. Ubuntu, delivering on choice and portability in the cloud, has resulted in it being the Operating System of choice in the cloud.

Today, Microsoft announced the first Technical Preview of Microsoft Azure Stack with Ubuntu. Azure Stack is based on Microsoft’s Azure public cloud model and allows organizations to deliver Azure services from their own datacenter. By including Ubuntu, Azure Stack supplies developers and customers the same great Ubuntu experience they are used to on Azure. Canonical is working with Microsoft to bring more choice and portability to the cloud, by having Ubuntu as a part of Azure Stack.

Demand for cloud (hybrid cloud) services continues to rise as organisations look more carefully at how to maintain tighter control over certain areas of the business. According to Synergy Research Group stats, cloud revenues as a whole increased by 28 per cent in 2015 driven in large part by the 45 per cent growth of the private/hybrid cloud market.

Microsoft and Canonical are well placed to bring the best of a cloud experience to developers and users. Working with Microsoft we have seen tremendous growth of Ubuntu on Azure. Use of Ubuntu on Azure is growing rapidly and, more than one in four VMs running on Azure are Linux. Ubuntu is also the preferred Operating System for the private cloud with Ubuntu running on more than 65 per cent of all OpenStack deployments with more than 1,000 users (among OpenStack deployments with more than 1,000 users, OpenStack survey — October 2015 PDF 6.7MB).

Ubuntu will form an integral part of the Azure Stack offering, given 70 per cent of the most popular cloud workloads run on Ubuntu. Users of Azure Stack will run the same software that runs on the Azure public cloud.

Azure Stack and Ubuntu deliver consistency across the public cloud and private cloud in the datacenter. Through a series of Technical Previews, Microsoft will add services and content to Azure Stack such as Azure Resource Manager templates to help customers start taking advantage of Azure Stack. Canonical is contributing validated Ubuntu images that enable open source applications to work great in Azure Stack environments. Microsoft and Canonical are bringing the full value of choice and portability to cloud to our users and developers. I look forward to continuing to expand the range of choice and guaranteeing portability by working with our Cloud Partners, like Microsoft.

The first Technical Preview of Azure Stack with Ubuntu will be live this Friday, January 29. Microsoft will be sharing much more information on Azure Stack with Ubuntu over the next couple of weeks, starting with a webcast hosted by Mark Russinovich (CTO, Microsoft Azure) and Jeffrey Snover (Chief Architect, Enterprise Cloud) on February 3.

Be on the lookout for more Azure and Ubuntu innovation coming this year from Canonical and Microsoft.