Microsoft Open Technologies, a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft, just announced the launch of VM Depot, "a community-driven catalog of open source virtual machine images for Windows Azure ...

Microsoft is preparing to launch a new persistent virtual machine feature on its Azure cloud platform, enabling customers to host Linux, SharePoint and SQL Server there.

And, as Sanders said, Linux and open-source are "where the customers are." So, what choices does Microsoft offer corporate Linux users on Azure? Well, first you can bring your own Linux distribution.

As Brien recently discovered, a glitch in Azure can cause a virtual machine to fail when it's manually configured to use a specific DNS server. Here's how the problem went down and how he fixed it.

You should at the very least try configuring a virtual machine (VM) on Windows or macOS with a Linux distro, if you consider yourself a software enthusiast or wish to get into development.