Microsoft Bakes Linux into Windows Server

Microsoft is graduating to become a Linux vendor. It started with Microsoft introducing WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) for Windows 10, which was the company’s attempt to help developers using Windows 10 manage their Linux machines on Azure cloud.

The company then worked with Docker not only to create Docker for Windows, but also to bring Docker containers to Linux servers, allowing customers to run more than 900,000 Linux containers on Windows Servers.

Now Microsoft is baking WSL into Windows Server. According to a Microsoft blog, “This unique combination allows developers and application administrators to use the same scripts, tools, procedures and container images they have been using for Linux containers on their Windows Server container host.”

With Bash on Ubuntu for Windows Servers, IT professionals can use *nix utilities on their Windows servers to manage Linux containers.

With this move Microsoft is moving closer toward becoming a Linux provider. It must be noted that Microsoft already uses Linux as a core piece in its Azure cloud. The operating system for Azure Networking Switch runs on a Linux kernel.