Announcing new open source advancements for the enterprise cloud at Red Hat Summit

Self-driving autonomous cars. Sensor-monitored manufacturing equipment. Smart cities that predict and prevent flooding. The digital transformation is underway, and it’s powered by the cloud. But there’s another underlying driving force behind this transformation: open source technologies. According to Forrester Research, more than 40 percent of IT decision makers consider open source a “critical priority” for the upcoming year, citing agility and flexibility as required assets in a rapidly changing cloud world. And many of these IT decision makers are from enterprise companies across a wide variety of industries, illustrating how open source technologies are poised to accelerate innovation in the enterprise.

This week at Red Hat Summit in San Francisco, we’re making several new announcements that highlight our commitment to customer choice and to the ecosystem, both for the enterprises of today and tomorrow. Our commitment means that companies can leverage our open, flexible, enterprise-ready cloud to accelerate their digital transformation – and that developers can build differentiated applications enabled by the cloud using any language, tool or platform.

First, today we are announcing the general availability of .NET Core 1.0 and ASP.NET Core 1.0 – key examples of collaboration between Microsoft and the community that transformed .NET into the platform for creating modern applications for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. This is a huge accomplishment for the entire open source ecosystem – with more than 18,000 developers representing more than 1,300 companies contributing to .NET Core 1.0. The new version also includes the first release of the .NET Standard Library, which will enable developers to reuse their code and skills for applications that run on servers, the cloud, desktops and across any device including Windows, iOS and Android. With the release of .NET Core 1.0, Red Hat is also announcing today that they are now actively supporting .NET Core 1.0 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, extending the benefits of .NET to the entire Red Hat ecosystem.

Beyond these announcements, we are also excited to share more exciting related announcements. First, today Samsung is joining the .NET Foundation’s Technical Steering Group, joining Unity, Red Hat and JetBrains. Also, the Eclipse Che team and Red Hat have also announced they’re adopting Visual Studio Code’s Language Server Protocol – an open protocol that enables some of the rich editing features in VS Code. This shows that the open source contributions from VS Code are being adopted by tool and language providers, giving developers the flexibility to pair their favorite language with their favorite tools.

This week, we’re bringing some new firsts to market as well. On Thursday, we’ll be demonstrating SQL Server 2016 running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We are seeing strong interest in SQL Server 2016 on Linux private preview, and this development will extend the mission-critical enterprise benefits of SQL Server 2016 to Red Hat customers. You can watch a livestream of the general session that will include this demo online beginning at 1:45 p.m. PT on Thursday.  Also, in partnership with Red Hat and 21Vianet today we’re extending support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Azure China operated by 21Vianet. This means the Red Hat customers in China now have access to Azure in China for the first time, driving new levels of cloud scale, supportability and agility in a key global market. In Azure China, over half of VMs on Azure run Linux and we continue making investments in open source capabilities there, such as last week’s announcement on the availability of CoreOS Linux in Azure China.

At Red Hat Summit, we are also showcasing other announcements that illustrate our continued commitment and momentum with open source, and our partnership milestones with Red Hat. For example, the newly announced CloudForms 4.1 significantly advances support for Azure including state analysis, metrics, chargeback and retirement, making Azure the most fully supported cloud in CloudForms. We are also making available a new, easy-to-use Azure Resource Manager template on GitHub that will make it simple to deploy Red Hat’s OpenShift on Red Hat Enterprise Linux in Azure, so developers can quickly develop, host, and scale applications in Azure with Red Hat’s self-service, container-based platform.

All these announcements build off our strong partnership with Red Hat, which has attracted global enterprise customers like Xerox, Fujitsu and University of Tokyo, the Secretary for the Environment of Sao Paulo, and Throwback Entertainment. This partnership is an important one for us, our customers and the industry, as we work to help our customers to digitally transition to their business. It is also illustrative of the work we’ve been doing with other trusted partners like Docker, Mesosphere, Bitnami, CoreOS, Pivotal, FreeBSD, Jenkins, DataStax and more – demonstrating that as the enterprise cloud for every business, Microsoft is working across the industry and with the community to help our customers achieve more in the era of digital transformation.

 

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