This was the message from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, standing in front of an image that read “Microsoft [heart symbol] Linux,” during a Monday webcast to announce a number of services it had added to its Azure cloud, including the Cloudera Hadoop package and the CoreOS Linux distribution.
In addition, the company launched a marketplace portal, now in preview mode, designed to make it easier for customers to procure and manage their cloud operations.
Microsoft is also planning to release an Azure appliance, in conjunction with Dell, that will allow organizations to run hybrid clouds where they can easily move operations between Microsoft’s Azure cloud and their own in-house version.
The declaration of affection for Linux indicates a growing acceptance of software that wasn’t created at Microsoft, at least for the sake of making its Azure cloud platform as comprehensive as possible.
For decades, the company tied most of its new products and innovations to its Windows platform, and saw other OSes, such as Linux, as a competitive threat. Former CEO Steve Ballmer once infamously called Linux a cancer.