Support for Open Source technologies on Azure
This blog post is the third in a series of six blog posts highlighting various aspects of Microsoft’s open source strategy. The previous two posts explained Microsoft’s Open Approach to cloud in generic level. Let’s now get an overview of support for open source on Azure.
So, what do we mean when we say that Azure and our entire cloud business is an Open Cloud?
Any Framework
The Microsoft cloud supports a wide range of industry leading operating systems, languages, tools and frameworks. From Windows to Linux, SQL Server to MySQL, and C# to Java. It puts the best of Windows and Linux ecosystems at your fingertips, so you can build world-class, globally scalable, secure applications and services that work seamlessly with any device.
Any App
As an example of how we support and integrate with Applications, we recently announced how we are integrating with Moodle, a very popular open source content management and collaboration solution for educational institutions. We helped port Moodle to Azure and contributed code to facilitate integration between Moodle and Microsoft Office 365, bringing a more productive experience to teachers and students by harmonizing login credentials, calendar management and course content creation, in addition to other workflow improvements for education institutions and other Moodle users. This will be an ongoing integration effort and it’s a great example of how we invest and partner with Open Source technologies to EMPOWER our customers. (https://news.microsoft.com/2015/01/19/new-microsoft-office-365-plugins-for-moodle-improve-workflows-for-education-institutions/)
We support and provide SDKs for all popular development languages, from Java and PHP to more modern open source programming environments like Ruby and Node.js. We have also developed and released a plug-in for Eclipse (Open Source Integrated Development Environment) to empower developers to build solutions and publish them to Azure in an easy and integrated way. Azure also enables DevOps through tools like Chef, Ansible, Puppet and SALT (read more here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Openness/DevOps)
Any Data
When it comes to Data management, we are committed to providing implementations of all popular database environments, both commercial and open source. We provide a Microsoft SQL Server PaaS service and through Cleardb we provide a MySQL PAAS service. We support the Hadoop ecosystem and offer HDInsight, a 100% Apache Hadoop-based PaaS service, and we also provide a supported Hadoop on Linux VM implementation for customers who prefer the IaaS approach. Azure also provides a Redis cache service and supports other popular database environments like MongoDB, Couchbase, PostGreSQL, Oracle and many others as an IaaS implementation. We also provide first party SDKs for developing apps using Android, IOS or Windows phones.
Any OS
And lastly, for device and operating system support you have the choice of a wide range of Linux distributions through the Azure-endorsed images from Microsoft partners such as Canonical (Ubuntu), OpenLogic (CentOS), CoreOS, Oracle and SUSE, as well as more than 1,300 community-provided Linux images in VM Depot.
The result is that we deliver an open, broad and flexible cloud that gives you the FREEDOM to choose the technologies that suit your needs.
Hyperscale with Hybrid and Enterprise support
The breadth of choices we provide are very impressive, but you might say that many of these technologies are also provided by other leading cloud providers. How many of them can provide this choice in a Hybrid way, at Hyper scale and with Enterprise grade support that Microsoft provides in every country? No other vendor can do this at the level Microsoft can. That’s why customers are voting with their feet and are moving their open source workloads and solutions to Azure.
Today we already have Linux powering 22% of all Virtual machines on Azure, and growing rapidly.
About the writer: Pasi Mäkinen, Open Source Lead, Microsoft Western Europe, is working with customers and partners to drive open source based workloads on Microsoft Azure cloud platform. Contact at pasi.makinen@microsoft.com or follow at Twitter @pasimak. Check the rest of the Openness story at: https://microsoft.com/openness. Find fresh and upcoming webinars on Open Source and Azure here: https://info.microsoft.com/WE-OSSonAzure.html.
To read the other blog posts in this series, please click the links: