Microsoft releases CBL-Mariner Linux distribution for cloud and edge

Lightweight distro is engineered to manage the internal workings of Microsoft's cloud services

Microsoft has released its own Linux distribution called CBL-Mariner, designed for cloud and edge use cases.

Unsurprisingly, given Microsoft's dominance of the desktop, this is not a distribution you can run in place of Windows, MacOS or Ubuntu. Instead, it's Redmond's initial play for the fast-growing edge environment - edge basically meaning everything outside the data centre and at the periphery of networks- so routers, firewalls, connected cars, cameras, IoT devices, robotics, etc, and is specifically designed for cloud uses.

Common Base Linux Mariner, to give the OS its full title, is described by Microsoft as "an internal Linux distribution for Microsoft's cloud infrastructure and edge products and services."

The introduction on GitHub goes on to say it's a lightweight distribution that's been "engineered with the notion that a small common core set of packages can address the universal needs of first party cloud and edge services while allowing individual teams to layer additional packages on top of the common core to produce images for their workloads."

Unlike most Linux distributions where you can download and install an ISO direct, to use CBL-Mariner you must first install an older version of Ubuntu (18.04), RPM tools, Golang and Docker and then build the installation image from there.

The operating system has been designed by the team who built Windows Subsystem Linux, WSL, middleware that allows developers to run a Linux environment directly on Windows, but its focus at this stage is very different, being specially engineered to manage the internal workings of Microsoft's cloud services, with attention to low resource consumption, rapid boot and security features that include a hardened kernel, signed updates, address space layout randomisation, compiler-based hardening and tamper-resistant logs.

Nevertheless, it's indicative of a very different attitude to all things Linux and open source at Microsoft since Satya Nadella took the reins.