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Microsoft, Red Hat develop open-source service for auto-scaling serverless containers on Kubernetes

It wouldn't be a Microsoft conference without a slew of open-source announcements. Here's the roundup of some of the big ones for Build 2019.
Written by Mary Jo Foley, Senior Contributing Editor

As it does at all of its big events these days, Microsoft is making a number of open-source-related announcements at its Build 2019 developer conference this week. They range from a new open-source container service on Kubernetes, to new functionality for Microsoft's GitHub open-source code repository, plus lots more. 

Here are a few of the bigger ones that Microsoft officials will be unveiling on Day 1 of Build 2019, which is today, May 6.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is keynoting not just Build this week, but also the Red Hat Summit on May 7. So it's not too surprising Microsoft is planning a Red Hat-related announcement this week, as well. Microsoft and Red Hat have jointly developed an open-sourced Kubernetes event-driven autoscaling (KEDA) service. KEDA enables developers to deploy serverless containers on Kubernetes in any public or private cloud, as well as on-premises, Microsoft officials said.

Unsurprisingly, KEDA works with Microsoft's Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Red Hat Open Shift. KEDA enables a container to consume events directly from the source, instead of routing through HTTP. This means any Kubernetes workload requiring scaling based on events rather than CPU or memory scaling can use the service. 

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. In 2017, the pair extended their partnership with by adding native support for Windows Server containers on Red Hat's OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Azure and SQL Server on OpenShift.

Microsoft is introducing a new Visual Studio Subscription with GitHub Enterprise bundle. This bundle will provide a way to buy GitHub Enterprise as part of a Visual Studio subscription. As of May 1, Microsoft made this SKU available for purchase on Enterprise Agreements for both VIsual Studio Enterprise and Professional users. 

And speaking of Visual Studio, Microsoft is announcing this week Visual Studio Online, a "web-based companion" to Visual Studio and VIsual Studio Code. The web version works with any device with a "modern" browser and is meant for quick taks, joining Visual Studio Live Share sessions or to handle tasks like pull request reviews on the go. It's available now in private preview. 

Microsoft will "soon" (a k a "in the coming months") open source its Q# compiler and quantum simultaors that are par tof the Quantum Development Kit in GitHub, officials are announcing this week.

In other GitHub-related news, Microsoft is bringing Azure Active Directory synchronization to GitHub users. This capability will be in public preview as of May 23. And Microsoft is adding GitHub Identity support for Azure GitHub users. This allows those users to sign into Microsoft applications like Azure Portal and Azure DevOps using their GitHub account, which means devs can go from the repository to deployment just by using their GitHub account. The new login system tries to match a user's GitHub account to an existing Microsoft identity with access to Azure.

Microsoft also is making available today the open-sourced version 1.0 of ML.NET, which enables developers to create models that use machine-learning tasks. ML.NET integrates with other deep-learning frameworks like TensorFlow and is interoperable with ONNX. 

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