Microsoft has made Ubuntu available on the technical preview of Azure Stack, it’s newly release private and hybrid cloud bundle for on-premises deployment.

Released earlier this week, Azure Stack is a technology bundle that allows customers to build the Azure Cloud in their own data centers. And although you’ll need some pretty sophisticated hardware to run it, it’s a kind of compromise, if you like, for customers who cannot or will not move to the public cloud, but who still want to take advantage of the cost and compute benefits it offers.

Azure Stack has been described as “an extension of Azure” by Microsoft Partner Director of Program Management Ryan O’Hara. He explained that the experience is just like Azure, with the same APIs and artifacts portable across both platforms. As a result, Azure Stack can be used as a hybrid cloud within the Azure Cloud itself.

Al Hilwa, program director of software development research at International Data Corp. (IDC), said Microsoft developed Azure Stack because it realizes that most midsize and large enterprises are not about to decommission their data centers any time soon.

“Microsoft is now tackling this area where cloud operator technology is brought to bear for internal IT and partner cloud operators,” Hilwa explained. “The key distinguishing characteristic is that this is semantically Azure. From a management API and app model perspective it is a proper subset of the broad services available in Azure.”

Microsoft said it’s planning to add to Azure Stack’s features in newer technical previews in the coming months. Planned features include more OS images and Azure Resource Manager templates, with Ubuntu Linux images being one of the first of these new updates.

“Microsoft and Canonical are well placed to bring the best of a cloud experience to developers and users,” said John Zannos, vice president of cloud platform at Canonical Ltd. “Working with Microsoft we have seen tremendous growth of Ubuntu on Azure. Use of Ubuntu on Azure is growing rapidly and, more than one in four VMs running on Azure are Linux.”

Zannos said he believes that Ubuntu “will form an integral part of the Azure Stack offering”, explaining that seventy percent of the most popular cloud workloads run on the OS already.

Microsoft said the first technical preview of Azure Stack with Ubuntu will be available to download later today.

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