Microsoft Builds on Red Hat Momentum with More Open Source Love

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By Talkin' Cloud

Microsoft made a number of cloud-related announcements on Wednesday, one of which builds on its recent joint partnership with Red Hat.

Microsoft and Red Hat customers can now deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances from the Azure Marketplace. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 and 7.2 images are now live in all regions except for China and US Government.

The instances can be deployed directly from the Azure Marketplace, where more than 60 percent of its images are Linux-based, according to Microsoft Director of Project Management, Azure, Corey Saunders. 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.”

On the container end of things, Microsoft has launched the public preview of its Azure Container Service which is designed to make it easy to create and manage clusters of Azure Virtual Machines pre-configured with open source components. The new service builds on Microsoft’s work with Docker and Mesosphere to provision clusters of Azure VMs onto which containerized applications can be deployed and managed, Saunders said.

Microsoft really seems to want to showcase its love for open source, highlighting a couple of recent partnerships, including an agreement with Walmart and its WalmartLabs team to enable OneOps on Azure, an open-source cloud and application lifecycle management platform. Walmart leverages Azure for public cloud while using OpenStack for its private cloud.

Separately, Microsoft gave its seal of approval to a group of Linux images created by Bitnami to give customers “confidence in deploying these open source images into [their] enterprise environment.” It will certify many of the Bitnami-created images over the next few months, Saunders said.

“Open source continues driving cloud innovation, and Bitnami is helping customers realize that value effectively,” Erica Brescia, co-founder and COO of Bitnami said in a statement. “We’re really excited about the next chapter of our journey with Microsoft as we deliver an extensive catalog of open source applications to Microsoft Azure customers around the globe.”

This first ran at http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing/microsoft-builds-red-hat-momentum-more-open-source-love