Azure for your Linux and open source components
The cloud emerges as a major disruptive force in shaping the nature of business and plays a major opportunity and allowing dramatic global growth. The cloud brings breakthrough change, and thus represents (for incumbents) a major opportunity and plays a determining role.
An increasing number of people recognize the benefits of locating existing applications or building new ones in the public cloud to reduce infrastructure and ongoing datacenter operational costs, along with the technical debt, maximize availability, simplify management, take advantage of a predictable pricing model – provided that the resource consumption is also predictable, rapidly deliver to the market, elastically scale in respect to the demand, but also to build and leverage key competitive advantages, open multichannel access for their own business, etc.
In such a context, Microsoft Azure is an open, flexible, enterprise-grade cloud computing platform that provides an ever growing collection of integrated Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Services (PaaS) cloud services - compute, storage, networking, data lake, not only SQL (NoSQL) and relational (SQL) database, advanced analytics, Machine Learning, Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, web, API, etc. - that allow organizations of any size to move faster, achieve more, and save money.
Azure, an open platform to support your choices and preferences for your applications
As a direct translation of Microsoft’s strategy that consists in:
- Meeting where customers are - devices, operating systems (OS), languages, and hybrid.
- Delivering the most productive and trustworthy cloud services platform that enables developers using any framework on any device or OS to create and power the world's applications and services that run anywhere.
- Providing the best cloud platform for partners to succeed.
Microsoft Azure supports Linux and the open source technologies millions of users already rely on and trust. Customers thus have suitable choices that help them maximize their existing investments or the ones they target for the future.
Support for IaaS on Linux, Java, and PHP Web application platforms is amongst many others provided. Azure offers Enterprise-grade support for all popular Linux distros: CentOS, CoreOS, Debian, Red Hat, SUSE Enterprise Linux Server, Ubuntu. There’s a little-known fact that about 50%+ of servers in Azure are running Linux and Azure is running containerized workloads. Besides that, the microservices are all using open source programming languages and interfaces.
You can seamlessly and easily develop and test your Linux and open source components in Azure. Microsoft Azure enables every developer and organization to more easily adopt open source in the cloud, without having to be an expert. You can bring the tools you love and skills you already have, and run virtually any application, using your data source, with your OS. You can even install and run Microsoft SQL Server on Linux.
As such, you can use Microsoft Azure to deploy a variety of existing and new (business-critical) workloads and benefit from rapid feature growth, resiliency, and the cost-effective operation of the hyperscale public cloud while still obtaining the levels of isolation, security, compliance, and confidence required to handle your workloads.
In addition, you can complement what you’ve already built by using Azure, augment your open source workloads, and add values to them with technologies and fully managed services that work well with each other.
For that purpose, you can tap into a growing ecosystem of solutions, including open source, available from the Azure Marketplace that enable rapid deployment in the cloud. At the time of writing, this includes over 8,000 listings.
For testing purposes, you can leverage Azure Test Drives. Azure Test Drives are free ready-to-go environments that allow you to experience a product or a technology for free without needing an Azure subscription at all. One can for example test drive Ansible Tower by Red Hat that helps organizations scale IT automation and manage complex deployments across physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructures.
An additional benefit with a Test Drive is that it is pre-provisioned - you don’t have to download, set up or configure the product or the technology and can instead spend your time on evaluating the user experience, key features, and benefits of the product or the technology.
Open source, an integral part of our day-to-day approach to cloud innovation
At Microsoft, open source is a part of our day-to-day approach to cloud innovation.
In 2014, Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, directed all Microsoft engineers to “open source internally” so that anyone else at the company can see anyone else’s code and use it as needed. This vision is now a day-to-day reality for Microsoft engineers. In October of the same year, he even announced at a Microsoft Conference in San Francisco that Microsoft loves Linux!
These are only two examples amongst many many others.
As illustrated above, Microsoft joined the Linux Foundation in 2016 as a Platinum member to confirm the steadily increasing interest and engagement in the open source development.
Microsoft also joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a Platinum member in 2017. CNCF is a part of the Linux Foundation, which helps govern for a wide range of cloud-oriented open source projects, such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTracing, Fluentd, Linkerd, containerd, Helm, gRPC, and many others.
Microsoft is very serious about open source and open sourced .NET, PowerShell, and many other technologies and products. As far as Azure is concerned, technical documentation, SDKs, and examples are all open source and available on GitHub: https://github.com/Azure.
Satya Nadella said back in 2018:
Judge us by the actions we have taken in the recent past, our actions today and in the future.
Microsoft is working together with open source projects and vendors and is also a major contributor of code to many open source projects.
For example, to make Kubernetes easier for organizations to adopt - and easier for developers to use - Microsoft has tripled the number of employees who participate in the open source project in just three years. Now the third-leading corporate contributor, Microsoft works to make Kubernetes more enterprise-friendly and accessible by bringing the latest learnings and best practices from working with diverse customers to the Kubernetes community. As an illustration, we are delivering a simplified end-to-end experience for Kubernetes and adding new container capabilities with Docker and serverless Kubernetes integration for cloud-native applications.
All these investments that pertain to Kubernetes are led by the following people:
- Brendan Burns, Kubernetes cofounder, Director of Engineering at Microsoft leading the Azure Container Service and Azure Resource Manager teams, and now Microsoft Distinguished Engineer for containers and DevOps.
- Gabe Monroy, CTO and creator of Deis from which have originated the Helm, Draft, Brigade projects, and now Director of Program Management in Azure Compute responsible for Azure products spanning containers, functions, messaging, eventing, etc.
Gabe Monroy manages the teams responsible for open source infrastructure software in and around the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) including Kubernetes, Helm, Cloud Native Application Bundles (CNAB), Draft, Brigade, Virtual Kubelet, Service Mesh Interface (SMI), and more.
Likewise, we're also constantly looking for ways to improve developer and user experiences with SDKs for open source languages and an open API. Early this month, we’re announcing two new open source projects:
- The Dapr project. Dapr is an event-driven, portable runtime that takes some of the complexity out of building microservices, makes it easy for developers to build resilient, microservice stateless and stateful applications that run on the cloud and edge and embraces the diversity of languages and developer frameworks. (See blog post Announcing Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr), an open source project to make it easier for every developer to build microservice applications.)
- The Open Application Model (OAM) project under the Open Web Foundation. OMA is a specification that allows developers to define the resources their applications need to run on Kubernetes clusters and which Microsoft developed in cooperation with Alibaba Cloud. (See blog post Announcing the Open Application Model (OAM), an open standard for developing and operating applications on Kubernetes and other platforms.)
Plus, we're committed to sharing our cloud learnings with you and for your datacenters, thanks to Linux and open source support in Azure Resource Manager (ARM) and Azure Stack, an extension of Azure to consistently build and run hybrid applications across cloud boundaries.
Going beyond
If the above has piqued your curiosity, you might be interested in learning more about how you can leverage Microsoft Azure for your Linux and open source components to migrate, develop, deploy and operate your applications on an open, flexible, secure and trusted platform.
The whitepaper “Azure for your Linux and open source components - Migrate, develop, deploy and operate your applications on an open, flexible, secure and trusted platform” that I’ve just published introduces the key IaaS services to consider along with their core associated concepts, principles, and considerations. In addition, wherever relevant, additional managed PaaS services will be also highlighted.
This white paper can be downloaded at https://aka.ms/azure4oss.
(2019-11-29 update: version 1.1 is now available with a series of updates regarding recent Microsoft Ignite 2019 and KubeCon/CloudNativeCon 2019 announcements.)
Thanks, Philippe
