Red Hat and Microsoft today announced a strategic partnership that will see Red Hat solutions available on Microsoft Azure as well as colocation of support personnel, a first for both companies.
Under the partnership, Microsoft will be offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the first choice for enterprise Linux workloads on Microsoft Azure.
According to Scott Guthrie, executive vice president at Microsoft, the weeks immediately following this announcement will see Microsoft joining the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider program, while Red Hat subscriptions will be portable to Azure with Red Hat’s Cloud Access platform.
Azure customers will also be able to use Red Hat’s application platforms, namely JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Web Server, Gluster Storage and OpenShift.
It will also see the first colocation of support personnel of this kind between the two companies. The purpose is to help customers deploy hybrid cloud.
“Even as questions and integration points arise, our respective engineers can work together and give one answer to the customer in a timely manner, without finger-pointing,” Guthrie said.
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He explained that the first instance will be in Redmond, Washington, with expansions to global locations over time. According to Paul Cornier, president of products and technologies at Red Hat, collaboration on this level of depth with another company is new to the open source company.
After the initial weeks following the announcement, the two companies will implement pay-as-you-go consumption models for Red Hat products on Azure, Red Hat CloudForms integration with Azure and System Centre VMM, and Linux Atomic Host available on Azure.
Lastly, developers be able to access .NET technologies on Red Hat, including in OpenShift and Enterprise Linux.
“At Red Hat, we’ve always had to tell people Linux is ready for enterprise,” Cornier said. “With the announcement today that we’re extending Red Hat to Microsoft Azure, I think there’s no doubt.”