i know 2021 feels like a lifetime ago, but AWS had linux (Amazon Linux?) a decade before that (maybe even 18 years ago?) When i think "azure" i think AD, winserver DCE, and so on. Obviously if they want complete vendor lock in they have to have first party linux, too, rather than people doing hypervisors on VMs on hypervisors.
i used to call myself a "cloud engineer" 14 years ago, me and a friend developed a formal way to deploy thin clients using AWS as the host, and it worked well for everything including youtube videos. this was in 2009, we had both been working with AWS since the first "public" instances became available.
So i suppose when azure was announced and came out, i was acutely aware of what they offered, and it was, you know, marginally cheaper than the AWS windows servers, as azure didn't have to pay microsoft as much for DCE licenses, maybe.
But it makes sense they have Linux now, as i said, ecosystem lock-in...
