The two companies are working together to bring more open source projects to Azure

Jul 11, 2014 08:37 GMT  ·  By
Microsoft and Google are working to bring more open-source projects to Azure
   Microsoft and Google are working to bring more open-source projects to Azure

Microsoft has become a lot more interested in open-source software lately, so the company is more willing to tackle this world with every single occasion. Even if that occasion means joining forces with long-time rival Google.

The two companies today announced a new partnership that's supposed to bring more open-source projects to Azure, and thus expand Redmond's cloud offering with support for Kubernetes and libswarm.

Just like it was the case of the previous improvements that Microsoft made to Azure, it says this new announcement is the result of its “commitment to supporting our customers' needs and choices.”

While we've already heard that before several times, the company says that bringing support for more open-source projects to Azure would attract more developers, especially those who are looking for additional options to use Linux containers and get more control over them with Kubernetes.

“Announced in June, Kubernetes is a declarative container management solution supporting orchestration and scheduling of Docker containers, originally built on top of Google Compute Engine. Microsoft Open Technologies’ contribution to this GitHub project will enable Kubernetes capabilities on top of Azure Linux Virtual Machines,” the company said.

“Likewise, MS Open Tech is supporting Docker’s libswarm project, which offers imperative management on Docker, so that libswarm will natively support Azure in enabling deployment of containers on Azure Virtual Machines.”

Seeing Microsoft becoming more interested in open-source projects isn't quite a new thing, as the company has tried to do the same thing for month, although it's now working on a new strategy with Google.

Microsoft and Google are competing in several businesses, including the cloud industry, which could make some people wonder how come the two giants actually joined forces for a similar purpose.

The truth is that by working together, Microsoft and Google can continue their battle in the cloud industry, while also trying to offer better solutions to customers, which could in the end become the big winners of this new move.

Microsoft is focusing more on its cloud business these days, mostly thanks to the new vision brought to the company by the new CEO Satya Nadella, who himself put cloud at the key of everything before taking over from Ballmer. Nadella said with several occasions that Microsoft is well positioned to become a mobile-first, cloud-first firm, so today's announcement seems to be just another step towards this ultimate purpose of switching the focus from software to a wider array of products.