(Cloud) Tip of the Day: FreeBSD now available in Azure Marketplace

Today’s Tip…

FreeBSD 10.3 is now available as a ready-made VM image directly from the Azure Marketplace. This means that not only can you quickly bring-up a FreeBSD VM in Azure, but also that in the event you need technical support, Microsoft support engineers can assist.

As the above screenshot illustrates, Microsoft is the publisher of the FreeBSD image in the marketplace rather than the FreeBSD Foundation. The FreeBSD Foundation is supported by donations from the FreeBSD community, including companies that build their solutions on FreeBSD. They are not a solution provider or an ISV with a support organization but rather rely on a very active community that support one another. In order to ensure our customers have an enterprise SLA for their FreeBSD VMs running in Azure, we took on the work of building, testing, releasing and maintaining the image in order to remove that burden from the Foundation. We will continue to partner closely with the Foundation as we make further investments in FreeBSD on Hyper-V and in Azure.

"It's quite a significant milestone for FreeBSD community and for Microsoft to publish a supported FreeBSD image on Azure Marketplace. We really appreciate Microsoft's commitment and investment in FreeBSD project".

- Justin T. Gibbs, President of FreeBSD Foundation