Today we made some exciting announcements along with Red Hat around container support. We’re adding Windows support in OpenShift, OpenShift Dedicated on Azure and SQL Server support in OpenShift and Red Hat Linux to our joint roadmap, and extending the integrated, co-located support that has been a signature of our partnership. You can read all the news in the press release here.
For me the significance is the impact Red Hat and Microsoft continue to make in the cloud. It wasn’t long ago that the idea of these two companies working together would have been almost inconceivable. Well it turns out that word does not mean what people thought it did.
We’ve jointly recognized that customers aren’t choosing Red Hat or Microsoft, they have already chosen: they chose to use both technologies. Enterprises all over the world are using Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux; Java and .NET, and together Microsoft and Red Hat can serve those customers much better than either of us can alone.
This is why Microsoft joined forces with Red Hat in late 2015. We started by making Red Hat solutions available natively to Microsoft Azure customers, delivering integrated enterprise support across hybrid environments, collaborating on .NET for a new generation of applications, and more. Last year we announced that we would bring SQL Server to Linux, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Since then we’ve continued to work together to bring these and other solutions – and, with it unmatched choice and flexibility – to our customers. In that spirit, with this week’s announcement a customer running OpenShift can use Linux and Windows containers together in a single cluster, they can use .NET Core 2.0 in a container on OpenShift, and SQL Server on either operating system and OpenShift, either on Azure or in their own datacenters. This just extends our customers’ ability to choose the right technology for the right job and have them work together. It is pretty cool to see this come to life, even if it was inconceivable not long ago.
As I reflect on today’s announcement, one can’t help to think about Kubernetes. Last month, I talked about some of the upstream CNCF projects we are involved in. Since then, we’ve continued engaging with the community upstream including the Kubernetes Service Catalog, where Microsoft employees are amongst the top committers, upstream managed/dedicated blob disk contributions and of course the Open Service Broker API. Working with the community and contributing upstream will continue being an important part of our relationship with Red Hat.
I want to thank my colleagues at Red Hat for our partnership. We’ve put in a lot of hours together, and it’s always a pleasure. All of us at Microsoft thank you and look forward to continuing to solve problems for our customers together.
To learn more about Red Hat solutions in Microsoft Azure and get started today, visit azure.com/redhat.
