On July 4th the US celebrated Independence from my home country. On that same day I celebrated the second anniversary of my family’s arrival in the US as I prepared to join one of the many open source teams in Microsoft. An upcoming Microsoft Virtual Academy course focusing on the running of Linux workloads on Azure will highlight some of the work done by these teams. In this post I will share a little about this course, but first I want to highlight a change in my role here in Microsoft – one I hope those of you interested in Linux on Azure can help me with.
Two years ago I joined Microsoft Open Tech, Inc. to “help accelerate Microsoft’s open collaboration with the industry by delivering critical interoperable technologies in partnership with open source communities. My peers in the open source world expressed “some surprise” at this move. People were genuinely confused as to why I would not only give up on a successful open source consultancy business but also move my family to the US in order to “do open source at Microsoft”. The short version is that I dreamed about doing my small part to leverage Microsoft resources in open source projects thus further strengthening the software development model I love (for those who don’t know I’m very much a believer in vendor neutral software development, such as that practiced at the Apache Software Foundation).
Back in April we said “MS Open Tech has reached its key goals, and open source technologies and engineering practices are rapidly becoming mainstream across Microsoft. It’s now time for MS Open Tech to rejoin Microsoft Corp, and help the company take its next steps in deepening its engagement with open source and open standards.” This was fantastic news. It essentially means “job done” for myself and my colleagues in Open Tech. Of course, this also meant it was time for me to look broadly across the company and find a new role, one that focused less on internal “accelerating” and more on external “doing”.
I’m therefore pleased to report that I will shortly be joining the Azure Compute team. My focus, like many of my colleagues there, will be on Linux and Containers on Azure, but I hope to be helping out across many of our open source initiatives. Most of my work with MS Open Tech has already transitioned into this team while the remaining parts, like VM Depot (our repository of Linux virtual machine images), will be coming with me.
During my transition from MS Open Tech to the Cloud and Enterprise team, one of my first activities is to assist with the delivery of an upcoming live “JumpStart” event titled “Building Linux-Based Solutions on Azure”. There will be four sessions covering the following topics:
- Linux Data Options on Azure (presented by Boris Baryshnikov)
- Building and Accelerating DevOps Pipeline on Azure (presented by Kundana Palagiri)
- Building and Managing Docker Multi-Container Apps on Azure (Presented by yours truly, Ross Gardler)
- Application Platform as a Service on Top of Linux Virtual Machines on Azure (presented by Madhan Arumugam Ramakrishnan)
Come along at 9 am PDT on Tuesday July 14th, and hear what we have been up to and, through your feedback, help us understand what else we need to do.