Open Source And Azure – A Match Made In Heaven

Microsoft is not always associated with the open source movement but to think they no longer play nice is a mistake. Microsoft is a big backer of Open Source Software (OSS) and is putting significant resources behind it. Microsoft’s Azure platform works seamlessly with open source especially when it comes to cloud development interfaces and tools. In 2016, Mark Russinovich, CTO of Microsoft Azure, gave the keynote address at DockerCon; telling attendees that 33% of Azure virtual machines were running Linux. That’s up from 25% in 2015, when Microsoft joined the Cloud Foundry – a popular PaaS architecture that’s becoming the DevOps platform of choice for enterprises. Other Cloud Foundry members include the original founder Pivotal, Cisco, Google, IBM, SAP and Suse.

Microsoft Joins Cloud Foundry Foundation

Just last month, Microsoft announced they were joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation as a Gold member and are offering extended tools and integration sets to OSS. In his post describing the decision, Corey Sanders, Director of Compute for Azure, noted:

“In addition to joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation, we are also extending Cloud Foundry integration with Azure. This includes back-end integration with Azure Database (PostgreSQL and MySQL) and cloud broker support for SQL Database, Service Bus, and Cosmos DB. We even included the Cloud Foundry CLI in the tools available in the Cloud Shell for easy CF management in seconds.”

This support – from back-end integrations to interoperability with popular services – is due to the increased appeal of OSS by enterprise customers. Enterprises generally find Cloud Foundry useful because it can scale and support automation in multiple hybrid and public cloud environments.

DevOps Culture Drives Toolchain Standardization

Forrester predicted that, in 2017, “customer obsessed” enterprises would lead the second decade of cloud services, including a growing trend toward adoption of Linux containers (hence the Docker keynote) by enterprise developers. Their research note stated:

“Developers will consume [containers] directly and often build DIY stacks to power microservices development.”

Indeed, earlier this year, Microsoft acquired Deis to expand their Azure Container Service and Kubernetes support on Azure. As DevOps gains traction, the importance of standardized toolsets (such as containers enabling DIY stacks and well-documented APIs) facilitate communications and speed results across the DevOps toolchain. Gartner speaks of the importance of building and orchestrating a DevOps toolchain to better enable the perpetual delivery of applications efficiently, in line with the expectations of the business. “With DevOps initiatives maturing, IT and DevOps leaders are looking to identify and increase efficiencies across the entire DevOps pipeline, which results in a need for greater skills and more sophisticated, collaborative, integrated and automated tooling spanning the toolchain.” (Emphasis ours.)

Microsoft Supports Service Brokers

Microsoft, Google and Red Hat are among those working to build support into their service brokers to provide services to native cloud software and SaaS offerings based on Cloud Foundry, OpenShift and Kubernetes. Microsoft recently joined the Open Service Broker working group, a core initiative of the Cloud Foundry Foundation that aims to incubate the standardization of service delivery across cloud offerings. The Open Service Broker API “allows developers to write and configure against a single API and reach many developers across multiple platforms,” according to Cloud Foundry’s Caitlyn O’Connell, in announcing the API. Sanders noted, in the announcement, “Working with this group, I hope we can accelerate the efforts to standardize the interface for connecting cloud native platforms, offering you even more multi-cloud and multi-platform portability.” Whether you are a Microsoft shop or prefer Linux and Java – the Azure platform can work seamlessly for you. Atmosera provides the services to take help you make the most of Azure; and over one third of our deployments are using Open Source. Contact us today for more information.

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