SAN FRANCISCO – -Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq “MSFT”) and Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT)  expanded their alliance Tuesday to empower enterprise developers to run container-based applications across Microsoft Azure and on-premises.

Containers package code and runtime environments to make the easier to move the contained applications from one platform to another while retaining functionality.

With this collaboration, the companies will introduce the first jointly managed OpenShift offering in the public cloud, combining the power of Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, and Azure, Microsoft’s public cloud.

Kubernetes is an open source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of Linux container applications.

The announcement follows Red Hat’s earlier news from its 25th year Red Hat Summit in San Francisco of an expanded container deal with IBM.

Flexibility, speed, productivity

With organizations turning to containerized applications and Kubernetes to drive digital transformation and help address customer, competitive, and market demands, they need solutions to easily orchestrate and manage these applications, across the public cloud and on-premises. Red Hat OpenShift on Azure will be jointly engineered, and designed to reduce the complexity of container management for customers.

Paul Cormier, president, Products and Technologies at Red Hat said in a statement, “Very few organizations are able to fully silo their IT operations into a solely on-premises or public cloud footprint; instead, it’s a hybrid mixture of these environments that presents a path towards digital transformation. By extending our partnership with Microsoft, we’re able to offer the industry’s most comprehensive Kubernetes platform on a leading public cloud, providing the ability for customers to more easily harness innovation across the hybrid cloud without sacrificing production stability.”

In addition to being a fully managed service, Red Hat OpenShift on Azure, will bring enterprise developers:

  • Flexibility: Freely move applications between on-premises environments and Azure using OpenShift, which offers a consistent container platform across the hybrid cloud.
  • Speed: Connect faster, and with enhanced security, between Azure and on-premises OpenShift clusters with hybrid networking.
  • Productivity: Access Azure services like Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Machine Learning, and Azure SQL DB, making developers more productive.
  • are leveraging a consistent container platform in OpenShift across both footprints of the hybrid cloud.

The expanded collaboration between Microsoft and Red Hat will also include:

  • Enabling the hybrid cloud with full support for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on-premises and on Microsoft Azure Stack, offering a consistent on- and off-premises foundation for the development, deployment, and management of cloud-native applications on Microsoft infrastructure. This provides a pathway for customers to pair the power of the Azure public cloud with the flexibility and control of OpenShift on-premises on Azure Stack.
  • Multi-architecture container management that spans both Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux containers. Red Hat OpenShift on Microsoft Azure will consistently support Windows containers alongside Red Hat Enterprise Linux containers, offering a uniform orchestration platform that spans the leading enterprise platform providers.
  • More ways to harness data with expanded integration of Microsoft SQL Server across the Red Hat OpenShift landscape. This will soon include SQL Server as a Red Hat certified container for deployment on Red Hat OpenShift on Azure and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform across the hybrid cloud, including Azure Stack.
  • More ways for developers to use Microsoft tools with Red Hat as Visual Studio Enterprise and Visual Studio Professional subscribers will get Red Hat Enterprise Linux credits. For the first time, developers can work with .NET, Java, or the most popular open source frameworks on this single, and supported, platform.

This is the third container-related announcement Red Hat made from the Red Hat Summit.