The fact Windows and Linux have been competing for decades is but a small triviality in Microsoft Corp.’s plans to rekindle its ties with the open-source ecosystem. The latest beneficiary of the push is Debian, which today became the seventh distribution of the free operating system to receive native support on Azure through a partnership between Redmond and a consultancy called credative GmbH based out of Germany.

Developers can now quickly launch virtual machines with one of the two versions of Debian available through the Azure Marketplace instead of having to manually install the platform on every instance, which has the potential to save a considerable amount of time in large deployments. The addition brings the installation process on par with the experience on competing clouds like Amazon Web Services and DigitalOcean that were quicker to embrace the platform.

While not nearly as popular as its best-known derivative, Ubuntu, Debian nonetheless boasts a respectable 11 percent share of the web server market according to the latest W3Techs survey thanks to a rigorously maintained code base with a reputation for reliability. The official project website claims that machines powered by the operating system can run over a year without rebooting under certain conditions, due in no small part to a well-integrated package manager that makes installing third party software much less of a risk that it is on other distributions.

Adding support for Debian will put Microsoft in a much better position to target the numerous organizations that are using the platform in their environments for those reasons. The move also clears the way for existing customers with heterogeneous environments to move more of their existing processes to Azure, strengthening Redmond’s as one-stop-shop cloud pitch and putting more money into its coffers at the same time. More Linux distributions will likely be added to the platform over time to further expand the value proposition.

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