Microsoft and Red Hat will co-locate support teams at each other’s premises now and allegedly even... [+]
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.
So this means that Red Hat solutions will be available ‘natively’ on the Microsoft Azure cloud. In the coming weeks, Microsoft Azure will become a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider. Equally, Red Hat Cloud Access subscribers will be able to bring their own virtual machine images to run in Microsoft Azure. This is a consummated relationship with plans made for kids and a place in the country make no mistake.
Microsoft Azure customers can also use 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.
Did somebody say ‘seamless support?
Did somebody say ‘seamless support with unmatched choice and flexibility’ here? Yes, they probably did.
This is all about making it work and Microsoft’s cloud VP Scott Guthrie has promised to make this union happen while still fulfilling “rigorous security and scalability requirements”, as he put it.
Red Hat president of products and technologies Paul Cormier’s killer line was, “The datacenter is heterogeneous… and the cloud is hybrid.” Of course he’s correct and that’s why we are seeing developments like this happen.
IDC’s Hilwa rounded out the argument by saying that his firm believes that a significant portion of the two companies’ customers use both their technologies strategically.
“This means that this partnership will allow their joint customers to use a wide cross-section of both company’s technologies in a more integrated fashion and, for the first time, with the blessing and deep support from both vendors,” said Hilwa. “In many ways this partnership underlines the high level of maturity the open source model business model has achieved today and the broad acceptance and use it has received in the enterprise. While the war between Microsoft and Linux has effectively ended in recent years as the company embraced Linux in its Azure cloud, the partnership should act as an epilogue to the troubled narrative.”
Some ‘post soccer match’ bonhomie
This is cross-platform cross-company cross-team intercourse the likes of which we might never have reasonably expected under the bouncing bomb that was Microsoft’s previous CEO before the Satya Nadella years. Microsoft and Red Hat will co-locate support teams at each other’s premises now, exchange logo emblazoned T-shirts with each other in a sort of ‘post soccer match’ bonhomie and even eat at the same canteen.
