Microsoft gives Azure developers what they want: FreeBSD

Microsoft makes available a virtual machine based on FreeBSD for software appliance developers

Microsoft has updated its Azure cloud computing platform with the availability of a virtual machine based on the FreeBSD open source operating system, aimed at developers creating virtual appliances.

The company announced the availability of FreeBSD 10.3 on its Azure Marketplace, offered in the shape of a ready-made virtual machine. However, this version of FreeBSD contains updates to the open source platform from Microsoft itself, to ensure that it delivers an optimised version for developers creating virtual appliances to run on Azure.

"We have done a tremendous amount of work over the past couple of years to make FreeBSD a first-class VM guest on Hyper-V, enabling performant networking and storage capabilities that for the first time made it possible to run production FreeBSD workloads in Hyper-V environments," explained Jason Anderson, principal programme manager for Microsoft's Open Source Technology centre, on the Azure blog.

As Hyper-V is the virtualisation platform for Azure, this work enabled FreeBSD VMs to run in Azure. It also allows Microsoft to offer official support for FreeBSD as a guest on Hyper-V, so that customers can call on Microsoft Support if they need help.

"In order to ensure our customers have an enterprise SLA for their FreeBSD VMs running in Azure, we took on the work of building, testing, releasing and maintaining the image in order to remove that burden from the [FreeBSD] Foundation," Anderson said.

"Over the past two years, we've worked closely with Citrix Systems, Array Networks, Stormshield, Gemalto and Netgate to bring their virtual appliances to the Azure Marketplace, and we're continuing to work with a long list of others for future offerings."

FreeBSD is perhaps best known as the basis for other platforms, forming part of Apple's OS X operating system and the Junos platform in network hardware from Juniper Networks.

Microsoft's changes are mostly at the kernel level to optimise network and storage performance in a virtual environment.

Microsoft said it has "up-streamed" these into the FreeBSD 10.3 release, so anyone who downloads a FreeBSD 10.3 image from the FreeBSD Foundation is in fact getting the same version with the same improvements.