Microsoft’s Azure App Service, the firm’s fully-managed platform for building enterprise web and mobile applications, is now generally available on Linux, the company announced in a Wednesday blog post.

In addition to bringing the App Service itself to Linux, the Web App for Containers capability will be available on Linux as well, the post said. Container images in ASP.NET Core, Node.js, PHP, and Ruby on Linux will all be supported, along with Docker-formatted images supporting Java, Python, and Go, the post said.

Azure App Service made its debut in 2015 as a bundling of various Azure tools and services with a common app hosting, runtime, and extensibility model. The initial goal of the service was to make it easier and cheaper for developers to build and run apps on Azure, integrating data from other cloud services as well.

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Now, developers can run their apps on Linux while leaving all the infrastructure backend to Microsoft.

“Providing Linux support in Azure App Service is an important step towards our commitment to support a variety of OSS stacks on the platform,” Microsoft noted in another blog post. “We started on this journey with an intention to support OSS workloads running natively on Linux VM inside Azure App Service.”

The Web App for Containers piece of the puzzle offers a similar approach, but for containers. The idea is that developers can simply build out their container image without having to worry about the orchestrator layer. In its post, Microsoft said that it began working on Web App for Containers as a response to customer interested in running Docker containers on the Azure App Service.

Developers can push their image to Docker Hub, Azure Container Registry, or a separate private registry. Then, Web App for Containers will deploy the app and provision the proper infrastructure needed, the post said. The service also automates Linux OS patching and load balancing as well.

The 3 big takeaways for TechRepublic readers

  1. Microsoft’s Azure App Service and Web App for Containers capabilities are now generally available on Linux, the company announced Wednesday.
  2. With this integration, developers can build Linux apps with Microsoft handling the infrastructure provisioning and deployment aspects.
  3. Web App for Containers supports container images in ASP.NET Core, Node.js, PHP, Ruby on Linux, and Docker-formatted images supporting Java, Python, and Go.