New Open Source Milestones for Microsoft
It's a milestone month for Microsoft on the open source front. As we reported, the company just released a new open-source UWP Community Toolkit that eases app development by streamlining new capabilities (helper functions, custom controls and app services) that simplify common developer tasks. Meanwhile, we're also noting that Microsoft has open sourced PowerShell under an MIT license and ported it to Red Hat, CentOS, and Ubuntu. The company is making the command-line shell and scripting platform available for both Linux and Mac.
Microsoft's brand new open source VP, Wim Coekaerts, appeared at this week's LinuxCon event in Toronto, and he gave a keynote address, accompanied by a blog post. Coekaerts, who previously oversaw Oracle's Linux efforts, has much to say about Microsoft's new stance toward open source. Here are some of his priorities.
As background, Microsost CEO Satya Nadella himself is staying friendly to open source. In addition to proclaiming that he "loves Linux" and reporting that much of Microsoft's Azure cloud is already Linux-based, he has also given his blessing to open sourcing some previously untouchable code from the Redmond giant. MSBuild, the development platform for Microsoft's Visual Studio tools and .Net Platform, is officially open source, for example. The code is available on GitHub.
According to Coekaerts, Microsoft is driving numerous open source initiatives:
"The reality is customers use more than one tool and more than one platform to operate their businesses. They need tools that support Linux and Windows, and they need a cloud that allows them to run any application. One of the things I shared with linux.com recently was how blown away I was to see how large Microsoft's investment in Linux already is. We brought .NET Core, PowerShell, and SQL Server to Linux. We also open sourced Visual Studio Code and just recently PowerShell. And, we are contributing to and participating in numerous community projects."
"One of the areas we are focused on is delivering open management solutions. In today’s multi-cloud, multi-OS world, customers need simple, unified tools to reduce complexity. That’s why just last week, we announced that we’re open sourcing PowerShell and making it available on Linux. Now PowerShell users across Windows and Linux can use our popular command-line shell and scripting language to manage almost everything from almost anywhere. My colleague Jeffrey Snover wrote a fantastic story about the journey to open source PowerShell and how customer-centricity brought us here – go check it out!"
Microsoft is nvesting in making Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS), which gives you visibility into your applications and workloads across Azure and other clouds, a first-class tool for managing Linux environments. Last week, the company announced that the OMS Monitoring Agent for Linux is generally available, delivering visibility into customers’ Linux workloads to remediate issues.
Coekaerts also discussed Docker container monitoring, which we covered previously:
"I’m also excited to share that OMS Docker Container monitoring is available in preview. By nature, containers are lightweight and easily provisioned, so without a centralized approach to monitoring, customers may find it difficult to manage and respond to critical issues quickly. With OMS Docker Container monitoring, you get visibility into your container inventory, performance, and logs from one place, get a simplified view of containers’ usage, and can diagnose issues whether your containers are running in the cloud or on-premises. You may have seen Mark Russinovich demo this live at DockerCon in June."
You can you visit the Azure.com website on Linux to learn more about how open source is integrated with Microsoft's overall cloud strategy.