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Microsoft recently announced the public preview of Azure IoT Edge for Linux on Windows, aka EFLOW. The produce will let customers run production Linux-based cloud-native workloads on Windows IoT.
With Azure IoT Edge, storage and compute are closer to IoT devices, where it’s being gathered. The Azure IoT Edge open-source solution is offered by Microsoft to deploy Docker containers. It is also labeled as third-party services. EFLOW is now offered by Microsoft in Public Preview, enabling users to run Linux containers with the Azure IoT Edge service. It is possible now to deploy Linux in Azure IoT Edge as a virtual machine or module, which is made possible because Azure IoT Edge uses Microsoft’s own Linux variant.
Senior program manager at Window IoT Team, Terry Warwick, shares the same in a Microsoft IoT show video below:
We have recently released a first-party distribution of Linux called CBL mariner Linux and we have had a Linux kernel for quite some time at Microsoft. We have seamlessly integrated the Linux Virtual Machine and Windows’s virtual machine to run Azure IoT Edge. No matter if you are building custom solution from scratch or getting custom modules from market place, The Azure IoT Edge will run it smoothly with this curated Linux space.
As per a blog update about the EFLOW’s public update, the product also offers:
- An extension of Windows Admin Center (WAC) enabling installation, configuration, and diagnostics on the local device as well as from a remote workstation.
- Interoperability via both-way communication between Windows processes and Linux containers offers harmony, where the Windows process can provide UI or hardware proxy for business logic and ML inferencing provided by the Linux containers.
- Microsoft updates integration to keep the application up-to-date, plus the Windows runtime components, the Mariner VM, and Azure IoT Edge.
Warwick also mentioned in the video why Microsoft offered the EFLOW solution to its users:
Our customers have to choose between Linux or Windows, a second device is always needed to run Linux environments. Some IT administrators do not possess skillsets or knowledge to run both platforms. Which is why, we are making it easy for those enterprises that have invested hugely on Windows devices, architecture, management and knowledge to create that harmony of hybrid environment, where the enterprises do not have to invest again on new devices to host Linux environment.
All Hyper-V capable Windows 10 installed devices are capable of running EFLOW. Users can fid detailed information on Azure IoT Edge here
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