Two historic adversaries within the company now announced a new partnership to introduce a new Linux distribution on Azure and to provide a new type of joint support.
Microsoft and Red Hat, longtime rivals in the enterprise, signed a partnership agreement to enable their customers some accessory functionality, including the ability to run the Red Hat Linux distribution on the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform. The maneuver is not as surprising as it sounds, since Microsoft has tried in recent years to focus also on the open-source operating systems to support its platform Azure.
” Customers will be offered a support cross-platform and cross-company, expanding the proposals Microsoft and Red Hat in an integrated way, unlike any previous partnership agreement in the public cloud, ” the statement said. ” By placing the various support teams in the same structures, the experience will be simple and seamless, the speed of the cloud. ” The agreement puts Microsoft and Red Hat in a cooperative relationship apparently very tight.
It is indeed the first time that two teams of two different companies working together in the same structure in the particular field of cloud, all to support better infrastructure ” hybrid cloud “. Linux is not yet a novelty on Azure, but the agreement with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, natively and also proposed by default if it requires the operating system open source, may tickle the interest of many business realities, much more than other more general distributions.
The reasons that led to the signing of the agreement are simple. Red Hat customers of large companies tend to use technology from multiple companies, sometimes based on Linux, on other Microsoft services. These customers require that the various technologies cooperate with one another, with a guaranteed support that is as efficient as possible. The opening of Microsoft against Linux on Azure began in 2012, and currently 25% of the instances of the platform they are running on a distro of the open-source operating system.