Microsoft and Red Hat are expanding the parameters of a relationship first struck in 2015, bringing Microsoft Azure and SQL Server closer to Red Hat’s container orchestration product as the former rivals continue to make peace in the cloud.
“We’re extending the relationship we started around hybrid (cloud) to hybrid and containers,” said John Gossman, lead architect for Azure, in an interview ahead of the joint announcement Tuesday. The 2015 partnership deal made it easier for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) customers to run a hybrid cloud strategy between their own data centers and Azure, and the companies have updated their plans to support customers using container-related products and services from each company.
Already available on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, OpenShift Dedicated — a cloud-based Red Hat-supported version of OpenShift, its commercial version of the open-source Kubernetes container-orchestration product — is coming to Azure. Along those same lines, customers of Microsoft’s Azure Stack hybrid cloud product will be able to run RHEL on their hybrid infrastructures.
“Our focus is on making sure we have joint customers today that are using or considering using our products … can get the value they want from both companies,” said Mike Ferris, vice president of technical business development and business architecture at Red Hat.You would have gotten quite a laugh out of a CIO even five years ago at the notion of running jointly supported Windows and Linux technologies inside your data center, but the world has changed.
OpenShift will also support Windows containers, making it the first commercial version of Kubernetes to support both Windows and Linux containers, the companies said. ““We’re positioning OpenShift as the container management platform for Azure,” Ferris said.
All of these capabilities will be coming early next year. Red Hat announced a sweeping partnership with AWS at its Red Hat Summit last May, and today’s announcement adds many of the same container-related capabilities that were announced as part of that deal.
