Azure Container Service, the Docker-friendly container management offering from Microsoft and data center orchestration specialist Mesosphere, is now available to all comers. And about 25% of the virtual machines running on Azure are using Linux, too, as of summer 2015. For those interested, RHEL images 6.7 and 7.2 can be grabbed from the Azure Marketplace now for most regions excluding China. They aren’t available for us government customers, though.
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And yet, under the leadership of CEO Satya Nadella, the company has committed its Microsoft Azure cloud to supporting open source technologies like Linux, and buried the hatchet with Linux distributors like Red Hat. Furthermore, Microsoft’s new approach also ensures that customers gain support from both the company and Red Hat. And it’s not just one way collaboration on Azure. He said in a blog post that Microsoft has seen “strong interest and momentum from [its] customers looking to bring their Red Hat investments to Azure”. Ferris described how Red Hat has co-located support engineers, so if a customer calls into either Red Hat or Microsoft for aid, the call can be escalated to a centre where engineers from both companies “sit side-by-side” to solve the problem.
Previously, you were already able to port existing RHEL licences over to Azure but now Microsoft and Red Hat are offering integrated subscription support through direct access to the Red Hat customer portal when customers buy RHEL instances through Azure Marketplace. Until today, OneOps only offered a machine image for Amazon’s AWS platform. He said that “more than 60 percent” of the Azure Marketplace images now are Linux based.
Not long ago, it seemed impossible that Microsoft would ever do anything with technologies like the rival operating system Linux, which ex-CEO Steve Ballmer once likened to a “cancer”. The new Linux images are available now on the Azure marketplace. Bitnami makes a software server stack that’s typically used for running production apps and dev testing.
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The US Department of Defence plans to move all of its Microsoft-based systems to Windows 10 within a year, and Microsoft has been swift to highlight the announcement as a huge endorsement of the latest version of the platform. But the real mission is to provide customers with a single, consistent way to use – and obtain support for – both Microsoft’s and Red Hat’s products.
