Azure, Open Source and the Rebel Alliance.

For a long time Microsoft has not been regarded well within the Open Source community, essentially seen as The Empire to Open Source’s Rebel Alliance. The gate and guards at Thames Valley Park aren’t there to stop Open Source developers from firing Proton Torpedoes down an exhaust vent, but the sentiment in some quarters would make it a reasonable precaution, with these two sets of opposing value; commercially and community developed software.

Much has changed at Microsoft, certainly since Satya Nadella’s appointment as CEO in February 2014, both culturally and operationally, and it has been hard to miss. One of the strongest indicators of this is the relationship with Open Source. A couple of years ago, the code for .NET was released on Open Source. In 2016 Microsoft was the biggest corporate contributor to the Open Source Community and announced a release SQL would be coming to Linux.

So, that’s sorted that, right? Well, let’s just say we’re not camping out together on Endor, sitting around the camp fire with a bunch of talking teddy bears, yet. Despite the points mentioned above being widely reported in the media, it remains a remarkably well kept public secret. This wouldn’t matter if these were two paths to the same solution, but the situation’s pivoted, because: Azure.

Please know and share this; Azure supports Open Source! Beginning with many different versions of Linux, including, for over a year now, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as a supported deployment. Microsoft has created a FreeBSD release, cut down for Azure, code for which will be available to the FreeBSD foundation. Oracle, SUSE, Clear Linux Project, Kali, in no particular order, were the first few Linux OS builds that came up in the Azure Marketplace. These are servers that you can deploy from templates and SSH into. MySQL or PostgresSQL for database (or others). For Big Data solutions, you can deploy a Hadoop cluster, the whole thing, from a template, and run it in Azure.

If you don’t want the management overhead of running, managing and updating the servers on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), in the case of Hadoop you can deploy HDInsight on Platform as a Service (PaaS). For AppServices, if you want to build a PaaS Web Service you have the choice of C#, HTML5, Java, Node.js, PHP and Python. If you want WordPress, Umbraco, Joomla, or Drupal, we’ve got you covered. And that’s all from PaaS, I am sure those lists with grow. Azure support Git, TFS, GitHub, and Visual Studio Team Services for continuous development. Linux containers are in preview. If it’s not covered, you can still deploy on a Linux server and benefit from a secure, hyperscale platform.

All of that, and more, and yet, there remain a perception issue with Azure, what with it being built on Windows Hyper-V, it is still Microsoft. Microsoft only. It’s like fast forwarding the analogy to The Force Awakens and Microsoft is Finn, who starts in Storm Trooper whites, but realises the gig’s not for him. At first, though, despite wearing civvies, Finn is struggling to drop his Imperial overtones, the issue is mostly a precocious bleeping metal beach ball, to be fair. This is kind of where I feel the Microsoft Open Source sentiment is right now. Once working in competition with Open Source, Microsoft is now embracing it, but the commercial-only image lingers.

It may have turned into a bit of a features list, and it’s in no way extensive, but I hope the above helps give some context to Microsoft’s actual relationship with the Open Source Community. Azure is an incredible platform, don’t let outdated perceptions be a blocker.

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