Microsoft, Red Hat extend their partnership with container support
Microsoft and Red Hat are expanding their existing partnership around Windows Server with more hybrid-container support for enterprise users.
On August 22, the two companies said they would be making available native support for Windows Server containers on Red Hat's OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Azure and SQL Server on OpenShift.
Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat's container application platform, is built from Kubernetes and meant to support both Linux and Windows workloads in a single platform. This capability, which Red Hat demonstrated in May 2017, will be available as a technology preview in Spring 2018 with Windows Server support.
Until late 2015, Red Hat was noticeably absent from the list of Linux distributions that Microsoft supported on Azure. (Others already there at that time included Ubuntu, CentOS, Oracle Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE.) Microsoft and Red Hat ended up finally announcing a deal -- which involved a patent agreement between the two companies -- in November 2015.
Last year, the pair demonstrated SQL Server running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is one of the flavors of Linux on which the coming SQL Server 2017 database will run once it's generally available (which is expected to be very soon).
Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Azure will be available in early 2018. And SQL Server for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift, which will be jointly supported by the two companies, will be generally available this Fall, Microsoft officials said today.
Red Hat and Amazon announced joint support for OpenShift and a deal to align Red Hat Enterprise Linux and AWS earlier this year.
Update: Red Hat also announced today, August 22, that it is now supporting .NET Core 2.0 across its portfolio. Microsoft made .NET Core 2.0 generally available last week.
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