For Red Hat and Microsoft Together, the Cloud Beckons

Earlier this month, we covered Microsoft's newfound relationships with both Red Hat and Hadoop. The company has a new partnership with Red Hat to ensure that applications developed in the Microsoft .NET Framework language can run on RHEL, OpenShift and the new Red Hat Atomic Host container platform. And, Microsoft has announced the availability of Azure HDInsight, a fully managed Apache Hadoop cluster service running on Linux in its Azure cloud.

Since the relationship with Red Hat was announced, some good analysis has appeared. It looks like the two companies could do some powerful things together.

The Microsoft/Red Hat partnership calls for a Red Hat engineering team to actually move to Redmond to provide joint technical support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux workloads running in the Microsoft Azure public cloud and on its hybrid cloud offerings. That ensures that the companies will have closely tied cloud computing goals.

As Forbes reports:

"This deal marks a significant milestone for Microsoft, Red Hat, and their customers. It is also reflective of the changing attitude of Microsoft that is open to collaborating with its arch rivals."

"Early in its cloud journey, Microsoft realized the importance of making Azure OS agnostic. It was clear that the decade-old strategy of bundling everything with Windows OS would not work for Azure... Given that Red Hat doesn’t have its own public cloud, its success comes from making RHEL a ubiquitous OS for enterprise workloads across multiple clouds. These factors forced Red Hat to consider partnering with Microsoft."

 Going even deeper into the prompts for this new relationship, new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella previously ran Microsoft's cloud computing division. He has said in public that he "loves Linux." He also reportedly claims that more than a third of Microsoft's Azure cloud is already Linux-based.

Indeed, Nadella is the biggest prompt of all for Microsoft's more ecumenical approach to partnerships and open source. And as for Red Hat, there is enough competition on the cloud computing scene that the company can only benefit from hitching its wagon to Microsoft's in the cloud. It's a win-win for both companies.