Microsoft"s Azure platform has been getting a steady stream of updates this year, the most recent of which was the ability to recover IaaS VMs in case of a disaster. The latest enhancement for the platform brings support for OpenBSD-based disk images and network appliances.
In a post on the official Azure blog, Kylie Liang, Senior PM for Open Source at Azure, reveals that through a partnership with security vendor Esdenera, the Redmond giant now supports OpenBSD 6.1 on its cloud platform.
For those not familiar, OpenBSD is an open source OS, considered to be "the most secure UNIX-like operating system by many security professionals". Its method of operation and its relentless and comprehensive source code audit allows for its use in the creation of firewalls - much like the Esdenera solution which brought support for the OS on Azure. OpenBSD is also suitable for the building of "private network services in a distributed environment".
If you wish to take advantage of this new capability, Microsoft has provided documentation on the crafting of OpenBSD disk images, which can then be converted to Virtual Hard Drives (VHD) and used to create virtual machines on Azure.