Hi All:
As requested, I would like to introduce myself as a representative of Microsoft Azure and request membership in the CentOS Cloud Instance SIG. My formal goal in joining this group is of course to bring community-supported and high-quality CentOS images to Microsoft Azure. At Microsoft I drive the technical collaboration with many of the various Linux distributions that exist in the Azure Gallery - which includes numerous efforts around image creation, testing and support of these images on Azure. I hope to do the same with the CentOS community.
My group is also responsible for a few other key components that will be important for this effort, such as the device drivers for Hyper-V/Azure (which already ship with the CentOS kernel), the Azure Linux agent and various others. We work closely with the upstream developers to ensure customers have a great experience running CentOS in Hyper-V/Azure virtualized environments. Having official CentOS images I think will allow us to build and continue to improve on those efforts.
Looking forward to working with you all. Please let me know if I should provide more details.
Thanks! Steve