Microsoft Spins Its Own FreeBSD Image For The Cloud

Last year Microsoft announced their own Linux platform used by their Azure cloud in the networking space while now the company has announced their own FreeBSD spin for use by customers as a VM OS.

Microsoft is offering their own spin of FreeBSD via the Azure Marketplace. Microsoft has spun their own FreeBSD 10.3 image that differs from upstream FreeBSD. Microsoft has integrated various kernel-level improvements -- particularly around network and storage performance -- for helping FreeBSD on Azure. Microsoft is working on getting those changes into upstream FreeBSD, but that didn't happen for their 10.3 release. Microsoft's FreeBSD also adds in Azure VM Guest Agent and other modifications.

More details on Microsoft's spin of FreeBSD can be found via this Azure blog post.