Microsoft and Red Hat to make it easier for firms to work with containers

Microsoft and Red Hat to make it easier for firms to work with containers
Microsoft and Red Hat have expanded their alliance to help enterprises embrace hybrid cloud 

Richard Humphreys |


Enterprises see the benefit in using containerised applications to run their mission-critical applications, but most IT organisations are not standardised on a single infrastructure stack. These heterogeneous environments often carry both Windows and Linux platforms, siloing applications and making it difficult for a business to adopt DevOps practices.

With this in mind, Microsoft and Red Hat have expanded their alliance with new initiatives aimed at enabling enterprises to more easily adopt containers. This includes 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. These additions to the companies’ joint roadmap will simplify container technologies to help enterprise customers increase agility and drive digital transformation using hybrid cloud.

“Microsoft and Red Hat are aligned in our commitment to bring enterprise customers the hybrid cloud solutions they need to modernise 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.”

“Alongside Microsoft, Red Hat is providing a way for organisations to truly make the technology choices that matter to them, from containerised workloads to public cloud services, without adding an equal burden of complexity,” said Matthew Hicks, vice president of software engineering, OpenShift and Management, Red Hat. “Combined with our integrated support teams, we’re able to offer an achievable pathway to digital transformation that offers the capabilities, flexibility and choice required to power the future of enterprise IT.”

As part of the partnership expansion, Red Hat OpenShift will be the first container application platform built from the open source Kubernetes project to support Linux and Windows Server container workloads in a single platform across a hybrid cloud. This is expected to be available as a “technology preview” in spring 2018.

Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated, a container platform as a cloud service managed by Red Hat, will be made available on Azure, Microsoft’s cloud service. The move allows IT teams to easily manage the infrastructure associated with cloud-based applications and containers, freeing them up to help their companies grow rather than micro-managing resources. Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Microsoft Azure is expected to be available early next year.

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