In a bid to take on Amazon and other giants of public cloud infrastructure, Microsoft announced on April 16 that it has launched its own Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering as part of Windows Azure. Stepping beyond Microsoft's Platform-as-a-Service offerings, the new expanded Azure cloud service will allow users to deploy full virtual machines in Microsoft's cloud—including Linux instances.

The offering, which has been in limited release with companies such as the marketing and media firm Digital Air Strike, signals that Microsoft feels it is ready to take on Amazon. Bill Hilf, Microsoft General Manager for the Windows Azure team, wrote in a blog post that Digital Air Strike had been considering using Amazon Web Services before signing on for the Azure IaaS trial. "But [they] concluded that 'when you work for the enterprise, you have to choose Microsoft.'" Hilf added that Microsoft will also match Amazon's pricing on virtual machines and would provide "monthly SLAs that are among the industry's highest."

Microsoft is offering a number of preverified server images running on Windows Server, including instances of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2013, Project Server 2013, System Center, SharePoint (2010 and later), and SQL Server (64-bit versions, 2008 and later). The image library available to customers also includes Ubuntu, CentOS, and SUSE Linux distributions.

Hilf has made inflammatory comments in the past about Linux and open source. In a 2007 blog post, he tried to clarify his comment that "the Free Software movement is dead" by saying that he saw Linux as both a competitor and something Microsoft needed to interoperate with. Now his group is looking to cash in on Linux by including it in Microsoft's cloud product line.