Clear Linux OS is not just another desktop Linux operating system, it’s an operating system by Intel designed for the cloud to compete with the likes of Container Linux. Now Microsoft is offering support for the operating system in its Azure Cloud.

Jose Miguel Parrella, Product Manager, Open Source, at Microsoft wrote in a blog post, “Microsoft Azure is the first public cloud provider to offer Clear Linux, and we’re really excited about what it means for Linux users in the cloud and the community at large.”

According to Parrella, Microsoft is offering a bare-bones virtual machine that can be used by customers to build out a system with bundles of their choice. It offers a container image that includes the popular Docker container run time and a sample solution image for developing machine learning applications preloaded with popular open source tools.

Parrella highlighted the performance of Clear Linux OS and said, “In addition to the performance features of Clear Linux, we believe that DevOps teams will benefit from the stateless capabilities of Clear Linux in Azure. By separating the system defaults and distribution best practices from the user configuration, Clear Linux simplifies maintenance and deployment which becomes very important as infrastructure scales.”

The move is not surprising because one out of three virtual machines in Azure run Linux and Microsoft wants to ensure that no matter which distribution Azure customers run, it’s fully supported on its cloud.