Microsoft has announced a bumper set of updates to its Azure cloud platform. The most significant of these is a new virtual machine role, allowing customers to deploy their own virtual machine images onto Microsoft's servers—and to do so whether they run Windows or Linux. The new features are now being previewed.

OpenSUSE 12.1, CentOS 6.2, Ubuntu 12.04, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1 join Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate in the list of compatible operating systems that can be used in Azure's new infrastructure-as-a-service virtual machine role.

While Azure's platform-as-a-service roles are non-persistent (applications should store data in one of the Azure storage systems instead), the new VMs are traditional, persistent machines. This should make migration from on-premises servers easy to do.

Aiding integration with and migration from on-premises installations is Azure Virtual Network, allowing cloud-based machines to be securely linked to on-premises ones over VPNs. Virtual Network gives Azure users control over things like IP addressing and routing, to give fine control over how much access there is between cloud and premises.

Microsoft is also simplifying Web hosting with Azure. Azure websites allow deployment of ASP.NET, Node.js, and PHP sites using git, FTP, Visual Studio, and more. Both MySQL and Azure SQL databases are supported.

There are also enhancements to Azure's cross-platform capabilities, with new libraries for Java and Python, in addition to the existing .NET, PHP, and Node.js ones. There are also command-line tools for Mac OS X and Linux in the Azure SDK to support deployment onto Azure from those platforms.

Microsoft is pushing Azure hard. From its original platform-as-a-service model, the new virtual machine capabilities mean that Microsoft now has a lower-level infrastructure-as-a-service offering too. The new website capability is in contrast an even higher-level service that relieves developers of almost all of the configuration and maintenance burden.