Microsoft has announced the general availability of its Azure Linux for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

Microsoft first announced a preview of Azure Linux containers in October 2022. Jim Perrin, Linux Systems Group Principle Program Manger Lead, announced the general release in a blog post.

We are excited to announce the general availability of the Azure Linux container host for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). The Azure Linux container host for AKS is a lightweight, secure, and reliable OS platform optimized for performance on Azure. With this platform, you can easily deploy and manage your container workloads using the same proven tooling used by many of Microsoft’s own services. This General Availability announcement follows our October preview announcement under the CBL-Mariner project codename. We’d like to thank the customers who provided valuable feedback and insight during our preview. Your insight and feedback helped to shape the product and ensure it’s ready for production workloads.

Getting started with the Azure Linux container host is as easy as changing the OSSku parameter in your ARM template or other deployment tooling. For more information or to get started check out our documentation.

Perrin says emphasized the platform’s security and reliability .

Our goal is to provide a secure and reliable platform to run your workloads. Towards this end, all updates to the Azure Linux container host are first run through a rigorous suite of Azure validation tests. This suite of tests is kept constantly updated as support for new scenarios is added. Additionally, since there are far fewer packages in the container host, the volume of required security patching is lower, and these issues are patched promptly as well. We closely monitor and fully curate the software supply chain, which enables a greater assurance of quality and resilience end to end.

ISVs and vendors looking to partner with Microsoft can reach out to the company via [email protected].