Microsoft Corp. has made good on an earlier promise, announcing on Wednesday that its fully-managed Azure App Service platform for building web and mobile applications is now generally available on Linux.

In addition, Microsoft said the Web App for Containers functionality is also being made available on the alternative operating system. As such, container images in ASP.NET Core, Node.js, PHP and Ruby on Linux will all be supported, alongside Docker application container images that support Java, Python and Go.

Microsoft launched Azure App Service back in 2015. The platform bundles a host of Azure tools and services together with a common application hosting, runtime and extensibility model. The service is aimed at making it easier and less expensive for developers to build and run apps on Azure. In addition, they can use the service to integrate data from other clouds besides

With the update, it’s now possible to build and run apps on Linux too, leaving Microsoft to take care of all the infrastructure backend, said Nir Mashkowski, partner director of program management for the Azure App Service, in a blog post announcing the news.

“Providing Linux support in Azure App Service is an important step toward our commitment to support a variety of OSS stacks on the platform,” Apurva Joshi, principal PM manager for Azure App Services, said in a second blog post.

Web App for Containers follows a similar approach with containers, which allow applications to run on multiple computer operating systems. Microsoft said the service allows developers to build their container images without needing to worry about the orchestrator layer that coordinates them. The company said the feature was added in response to interest from users who said they want to run Docker containers on Azure App Service.

With Web App for Containers, developers can push images to the Docker hub, Azure Container Registry or another private registry. The service then automatically deploys the application, while provisioning the infrastructure it requires, Microsoft said. In addition, the service automates load balancing and Linux OS patching as well.

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