There are a wide variety of officially supported Linux distros on Azure. These include CentOS, Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), and Ubuntu.

Customers who want to run Windows or Linux 'durably' (i.e., without losing state) in VMs on Microsoft’s Azure platform-as-a-service platform will be able to do so," Foley wrote yesterday.

Earlier today, Microsoft's developer account posted a tweet revealing that 40 percent of the virtual machines hosted on the company's Azure cloud platform are powered by Linux distros.

Azure IoT Edge for Linux on Windows, dubbed "EFLOW" by Microsoft, is a way to use Linux virtual machine processes with Windows- and Azure-based processes for Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

Linux enthusiasts might think the idea of running a Linux virtual machine on Microsoft's Azure service is like finding a penguin sun tanning in the Sahara. Linux in the heart of the Microsoft cloud?