It’s no secret that Microsoft has been doing good things with open source. Despite an obviously commercially aligned end game (Microsoft wants to win more market share, what a surprise) the firm has ‘committed code’ to the cause in precisely the form that an open source purist would consider a ‘code commit’ to be.
Inevitable in a sense then that we should hear news this week of the firm making a major play in the open source cloud market space. Microsoft and Red Hat will now partner to deploy Red Hat solutions on Microsoft Azure. To be clear, this means that Microsoft is offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the ‘preferred choice’ for enterprise Linux workloads on Microsoft Azure. To be even clearer, this means that Microsoft is recommending that we use another company’s operating system for Linux jobs on its cloud — well, any form of Windows wouldn’t work for Linux jobs anyway, but the point is made.
Fire & Brimstone: Cats & Dogs, Red Hat & Microsoft
IDC software analyst Al Hilwa sent an email out after hearing this news entitled Fire & Brimstone: Cats & Dogs, Red Hat & Microsoft — who’d have thunk it? Well, lots of people actually, Microsoft has taken bold new steps and has been on a path to partner with its fiercest rivals of past years agues Hilwa.
“The company has embraced Linux in its Azure cloud and is doing more in open source than ever. Still, this is a win for both companies and for the vast set of customers they have in common. For both firms this creates new opportunities for growth in parts of enterprise IT that have typically been apart. Strategically, this is what is required to be a player at scale in the cloud platform wars. For Microsoft, this is an important move in its initiative to compete at the top tier of the cloud wars,” said Hilwa.
As an ‘also’ to news of the alliance, both companies have said that they are working together to address common software application development needs when building applications on Red Hat software across private and public clouds.
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