One day after Microsoft announced that its managed Kubernetes service is ready for the general public, Red Hat announced that its OpenShift managed Kubernetes service will soon be available on Azure.
It’s the first time OpenShift will be available as a managed service via a public cloud provider, Red Hat said in a joint press release. You can run OpenShift on your own infrastructure, on public clouds like Amazon Web Services, or as a Red Hat-hosted service, but this announcement means that OpenShift customers looking at Azure won’t have to learn how to manage Kubernetes themselves when the service comes out of preview mode.
The rise of Kubernetes as the de-facto standard for container orchestration has been well chronicled, but despite the efforts of a growing number of companies it’s still pretty difficult for the average software factory to manage on its own. All three major cloud providers offer managed Kubernetes services of various types, and OpenShift can be used in hybrid cloud deployments to manage Kubernetes clusters across multiple environments.
Azure customers now have a few choices when it comes to deciding how they want to manage containerized applications. Microsoft has been pushing hard on its container strategy over the last year, previewing the Azure Kubernetes Service last year and formally opening it for business on Monday at Build.
