Microsoft Corp and Red Hat have expanded their alliance to empower enterprise developers to run container-based applications across Microsoft Azure and on-premises.

 With this collaboration, the companies will introduce the first jointly managed OpenShift offering in the public cloud, combining the power of Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, and Azure, Microsoft’s public cloud.

By 2020, more than 50 per cent of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, up from less than 20 per cent today, according to research and advisory firm Gartner.

With organizations turning to containerized applications and Kubernetes to drive digital transformation and help address customer, competitive, and market demands, they need solutions to easily orchestrate and manage these applications, across the public cloud and on-premises.

Red Hat OpenShift on Azure will be jointly engineered, and designed to reduce the complexity of container management for customers. As the companies’ preferred offering for hybrid container workflows for our joint customers, Red Hat and Microsoft will jointly manage the solution for customers, with support from both companies.

In addition to being a fully managed service, Red Hat OpenShift on Azure, will bring enterprise developers:

•    Flexibility: Freely move applications between on-premises environments and Azure using OpenShift, which offers a consistent container platform across the hybrid cloud.
•    Speed: Connect faster, and with enhanced security, between Azure and on-premises OpenShift clusters with hybrid networking.
•    Productivity: Access Azure services like Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Machine Learning, and Azure SQL DB, making developers more productive.

When customers choose Red Hat OpenShift on Azure, they will receive a managed service backed by operations and support services from both companies. Support extends across their containerized applications, operating systems, infrastructure and the orchestrator. Further, Red Hat’s and Microsoft’s sales organizations will work together to bring the companies’ extensive technology platforms to customers, equipping them to build more cloud-native applications and modernize existing applications.

Customers can more easily move their applications between on-premises environments and Microsoft Azure because they are leveraging a consistent container platform in OpenShift across both footprints of the hybrid cloud.

The expanded collaboration between Microsoft and Red Hat will also include:

•    Enabling the hybrid cloud with full support for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on-premises and on Microsoft Azure Stack, offering a consistent on- and off-premises foundation for the development, deployment, and management of cloud-native applications on Microsoft infrastructure. This provides a pathway for customers to pair the power of the Azure public cloud with the flexibility and control of OpenShift on-premises on Azure Stack.

•    Multi-architecture container management that spans both Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux containers. Red Hat OpenShift on Microsoft Azure will consistently support Windows containers alongside Red Hat Enterprise Linux containers, offering a uniform orchestration platform that spans the leading enterprise platform providers.

•    More ways to harness data with expanded integration of Microsoft SQL Server across the Red Hat OpenShift landscape. This will soon include SQL Server as a Red Hat certified container for deployment on Red Hat OpenShift on Azure and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform across the hybrid cloud, including Azure Stack.

•    More ways for developers to use Microsoft tools with Red Hat as Visual Studio Enterprise and Visual Studio Professional subscribers will get Red Hat Enterprise Linux credits. For the first time, developers can work with .NET, Java, or the most popular open source frameworks on this single, and supported, platform.

Red Hat OpenShift on Azure is anticipated to be available in preview in the coming months. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Azure and Azure Stack are currently available.

Paul Cormier, president, Products and Technologies, Red Hat said: “Very few organizations are able to fully silo their IT operations into a solely on-premises or public cloud footprint; instead, it’s a hybrid mixture of these environments that presents a path towards digital transformation. By extending our partnership with Microsoft, we’re able to offer the industry’s most comprehensive Kubernetes platform on a leading public cloud, providing the ability for customers to more easily harness innovation across the hybrid cloud without sacrificing production stability.”

Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Cloud and Enterprise Group, Microsoft said: “Microsoft and Red Hat are aligned in our vision to deliver simplicity, choice and flexibility to enterprise developers building cloud-native applications. Today, we’re combining both companies’ leadership in Kubernetes, hybrid cloud and enterprise operating systems to simplify the complex process of container management, with an industry-first solution on Azure.” – TradeArabia News Service