Google has been using its own custom version of Linux, Google Compute Engine Linux, as it loads its customers' applications into its infrastructure as a service.
It announced Thursday that it's dropping that approach in favor of using the Debian Linux distribution.

Debian Linux is the output of the Debian open source code project. All Linuxes use a kernel produced by the Linux kernel development process, led by Linus Torvalds. But Linux distributors surround the kernel with features that may match other Linux distributions or may differentiate that particular distribution. For example, Ubuntu was an early cloud supporter when it included Eucalyptus modules; then it switched to OpenStack as its primary cloud offering.

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