Microsoft and Red Hat announce enterprise cloud partnership

Red Hat Cloud Access subscribers would be able to use their own virtual machine images on Microsoft Azure.

Red Hat and Microsoft will also co-locate staff for end-to-end enterprise support for the Linux vendor’s products on Microsoft Azure. Additionally, Microsoft and Red Hat will be working to deliver application management and development for both private and public clouds.

Meanwhile, Microsoft Azure customers will also have access for the first time to a wide range of Red Hat tools, including the firm’s platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering, OpenShift.

Microsoft Inc and Red Hat Inc announced yesterday in a press release about their new partnership in the cloud segment. This adds to Microsoft’s support in recent years of numerous Linux guest operating systems on its cloud, including those from Canonical, SUSE and Oracle.

Meanwhile, Cormier concurs that demand for hybrid cloud computing capabilities is the driving force behind the alliance.

Enterprise Class, Made EasyAvailable on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace and from MariaDB, the new offering comprises a three-node MariaDB Enterprise Cluster based on Galera clustering technology and MaxScale for truly enterprise-class scalability.

“Today, it is incredibly likely that where you once found “Red Hat shops” and “Microsoft shops”, you’ll find heterogeneous environments that include systems from both companies”, he wrote.

This partnership provides the freedom for customers to move workloads between their data center and the cloud, provides the flexibility to integrate cloud workloads with on-premise data and ensures that applications can take advantage of the best deployment architecture and technology platforms available in the market.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella promises to bring non-Windows software on Azure to cloud operations never seen before, reported Fortune. Red Hat president of products and technologies Paul Cormier said in this morning’s webcast that the creation of the partnership was driven by strong customer demand on both sides.

This is the part that Scott Guthrie says Microsoft is doubling down on. According to Microsoft, this is unlike any previous partnership in the public cloud. To accomplish this, he said Red Hat will collocate its engineers with Microsoft’s so when issues or questions arise regarding integration points, their respective engineers will work together to address them.

“We look forward to offering our customers Trend Micro solutions that provide end-to-end protection from one of the foremost cloud security providers in the industry”. On the other hand, Red Hat has openly vowed not to impose its patent rights and obstruct the development of OS applications. “Until now, clients that wanted to use Red Hat workloads on Azure needed to get a special support note from Red Hat, so this is definitely good news for clients that want to use Azure”.