Microsoft and Red Hat collaborate to boost enterprise container adoption
Wed 23 Aug 2017
Microsoft and Red Hat have announced that they will collaborate to help businesses which are operating in hybrid environments to work with containers.
The enhanced partnership will see the two companies work together to support organisations that use containers across their own servers, as well as in the cloud.
The development is expected to help these businesses become more agile and embrace business transformation models to better serve their customers.
According to the announcement, Microsoft and open source giant Red Hat will now offer native support for Windows Server containers on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Microsoft Azure, and SQL Server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift.
‘Microsoft and Red Hat are aligned in our commitment to bring enterprise customers the hybrid cloud solutions they need to modernize their businesses as they shift to operate in a cloud-native world,’ said John Gossman, Lead Azure Architect at Microsoft.
‘Today, we’re extending this commitment as we again join forces to bring fully interoperable solutions that simplify container adoption and help customers make the most of their hybrid cloud strategies,’ he added.
Under the new agreement, Red Hat OpenShift will be the first container application platform built from the Kubernetes project to support Linux and Windows Server container workloads on a single platform over the multiple environments of the hybrid cloud. This capability is expected to be made available as a preview from spring next year.
Further to this, Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated, a ‘container platform as a cloud service’, will also be made available on Azure from early next year. According to the firms, the move will allow IT managers to easily manage the infrastructure linked with containers and cloud-based applications.
The two tech giants have also agreed to offer support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux workloads on Azure Stack, which allows companies to benefit from cloud services in their own on-premise servers.
Lastly, Microsoft and Red Hat announced that they will make SQL Server for Linux – a leader in the relational database management system space – available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift.
