Microsoft announced an expanded partnership with Red Hat in order to offer a fully-managed OpenShift on Azure, which will combine the capabilities of the Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes-powered Platform as a Service (PaaS) and the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. The public preview will be available in the coming months.
With the new managed OpenShift on Azure, developers will benefit from support for hybrid scenarios as they will be able to move their applications between on-premises environments and Azure. They can also connect faster with enhanced security to OpenShift on Azure, and have access to other Azure services like Machine Learning, Cognitive Services, and Cosmos DB.
The more intensive collaboration between Microsoft and Red Hat bringing OpenShift on Azure will include more ways for developers to use Microsoft Tools with Red Hat. Subscribers of Visual Studio Enterprise and Professional will get Red Hat Enterprise (RHEL) Linux credits. Furthermore, developers can work with .NET, Java, or other popular open-source frameworks. Also, there will be support for multi-architecture container management, with support for Windows containers alongside Red Hat Enterprise Linux containers.
OpenShift on Azure will also have an expanded integration of SQL Server across the Red Hat OpenShift Landscape; developers can deploy a SQL Server as a Red Hat certified container for deployment on Red Hat OpenShift on Azure and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform across the hybrid cloud, including Azure Stack.
The joint effort of bringing OpenShift on Azure is to ease the management of containers with Kubernetes. Developers will receive a managed service, which both Microsoft and Red Hat will support. Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's executive vice president, Cloud and Enterprise Group, said in a press release:
Microsoft and Red Hat are aligned in our vision to deliver simplicity, choice, and flexibility to enterprise developers building cloud-native applications. Today, we're combining both companies' leadership in Kubernetes, hybrid cloud, and enterprise operating systems to simplify the complex process of container management, with an industry-first solution on Azure.
Furthermore, Paul Cormier, President, Products, and Technologies at Red Hat, said in the same press release:
By extending our partnership with Microsoft, we're able to offer the industry's most comprehensive Kubernetes platform on a leading public cloud, providing the ability for customers to more easily harness innovation across the hybrid cloud without sacrificing production stability.
Managing containers with Kubernetes is becoming the de facto standard in the industry, which has been reported earlier on in the InfoQ news article about KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017. Furthermore, Gartner predicts:
By 2020, more than 50% of the global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, up from less than 20% today.
Besides the upcoming offering of Microsoft and Red Hat with OpenShift on Azure, IBM, for instance, released a managed Kubernetes on bare metal. With IBM as one example, more public vendors are pushing a managed Kubernetes service, including Amazon with AWS Elastic Container service for Kubernetes (EKS), and Google with their Kubenetes Engine (GKE). Even Microsoft has a managed Kubernetes service of their own, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), now generally available and intended for developers to simplify the process of building out container-based applications.