Microsoft has made its Linux Integration Services Automation (LISA) tool available♑ as a service to distro publishers, giving them a powerful tool to validate imag🎀es for Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft may be best known for its Windows, Office, Xbox, and its Azure cloud platform. What many may not realize, however, is that Microsoft is a powerful force within the Linux community. Gone are the days when Microsoft execs called Linux a cancer. The modern Microsoft has fully embraced Linux, has its own Linu🎉x dist🦩ro it runs on its cloud services, and is a large contributor to Linux kernel development.

The company’s LISA tool was already open source, but as , with the launch of Azure Image Testing for Linux (AITL), there is a new opportunity to expand LISA’s availability.

While the tool itself is open source, until recently the image testing service built on it to validate images for Microsoft Azure was internal-only. With the launch of Azure Image Testing for Linux (AITL), we are making LISA available as a service to distro publishers. I’m really excited about this move, as it promises to raise the quality bar across the industry.

In , the company explains how AITL works.

AITL is powered by LISA, which is a test framework and a comprehensive opensource tool contains 400+ test cases. AITL provides a simple, yet 🦄powerful workflow run LISA test𝐆 cases:

• Registration: Partners register their images in AITL’s validation framework.
• Automated Testing: AITL runs a suite of predefined validation tests using LISA.
• Detailed Reporting: Developers receive comprehensive results highlighting compliance, performance, and security areas. All test logs are available to access.
• Self-Service Fixes: Any detected issues can be addressed by the partner before submission, eliminating delays and back-and-forth communication.
• Final Sign-Off: Once tests pass, partners can confidently publish their images, knowing they meet Azure’s quality standards.

The blog goes on to highlight some use cases where AITL will benefit developers and tea𒉰ms.

AITL des💜igned to support a diverse set of users across the Linux ecosystem:

• Linux Distribution Partners: Organizations such as Canonical, Red Hat, and SUSE can validate their images prior to publishing on the Azure Marketplace, ensuring they meet Azure’s quality and compliance standards.
• Independent Software Vendors (ISVs): Companies providing custom Linux Images can verify that their custom Linux-based solutions are optimized for performance and reliability on Azure.
• Enterprise IT Teams: Businesses managing their own Linux images on Azure can use AITL to validate updates proactively, reducing risk and ensuring smooth production deployments.

AITL represents a forward-looking approach to Linux image validation bringing automation, scalability, and consistency to the forefront. By shifting validation earlier in the development cycle, AITL helps reduce risk, accelerate t🌼ime to market, and ensure a reliable, high-quality Linux experience on Azure.

Whether you’re a developer, a Linux distribution partner, or an enterprise managing Linux workloads on Azure, AITL offers a powerful way to modernize and streamline your validation workflows.

AITL looks like a promising tool for Linux developers and distro maintainers. Those interesting 🥂in g꧑iving it a try can .