A new partnership between Microsoft and Red Hat

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A few years ago, companies could be divided in “open source” or “closed source” software users. Most of the computing was done in-house. Today, companies are moving from bare metal computing (physical) to virtual, private and public clouds, using various technologies for different workloads. This often results in a mix of employed software based on the task at hand. As a result many enterprises employ open and closed source software side-by-side. 

This generates the demand for united solutions across different platforms with consistent APIs, frameworks, management and support. This means that customers not only want to run Linux on Microsoft Azure, they want to be able to build .NET applications on infrastructure powered by enterprise grade Linux.

Companies are starting to move to a micro-services architecture. They expect a consistent enterprise platform, APIs for certified applications and container portability across physical, virtual, and private and public clouds.

This is why Microsoft and Red Hat, both key players in this new, hybrid cloud reality, have announced a new partnership to help customers solve these hybrid cloud challenges.

 

Red Hat solutions are becoming available natively to Microsoft Azure customers. In the coming weeks, Microsoft Azure will become a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider, enabling customers to run their Red Hat Enterprise Linux applications and workloads on Microsoft Azure. Red Hat Cloud Access subscribers will be able to bring their own virtual machine images to run in Microsoft Azure. Microsoft Azure customers can also take advantage of the full value of Red Hat’s application platform, including Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat JBoss Web Server, Red Hat Gluster Storage and OpenShift, Red Hat’s platform-as-a-service offering. In the coming months, Microsoft and Red Hat plan to provide Red Hat On-Demand — “pay-as-you-go” Red Hat Enterprise Linux images available in the Azure Marketplace, supported by Red Hat.

 

Integrated enterprise-grade support spanning hybrid environments. Customers will be offered cross-platform, cross-company support spanning the Microsoft and Red Hat offerings in an integrated way, unlike any previous partnership in the public cloud. By co-locating support teams on the same premises, the experience will be simple and seamless, at cloud speed.

 

Unified workload management across hybrid cloud deployments. Red Hat CloudForms will interoperate with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, offering Red Hat CloudForms customers the ability to manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux on both Hyper-V and Microsoft Azure. Support for managing Azure workloads from Red Hat CloudForms is expected to be added in the next few months, extending the existing System Center capabilities for managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

 

Collaboration on .NET for a new generation of application development capabilities. Expanding on the preview of .NET on Linux announced by Microsoft in April, developers will have access to .NET technologies across Red Hat offerings, including Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, jointly backed by Microsoft and Red Hat. Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be the primary development and reference operating system for .NET Core on Linux.

 

To read more about the partnership, check out Scott Gurthie’s blog post and visit the Azure Marketplace for a list of cloud-optimized services and Virtual Machines, ready to deploy as test-, development- or production-environments.