Microsoft announces more open options and choice on Microsoft Azure

Customers can now deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances from the Azure Marketplace. Using these instances, customers of both Microsoft and Red Hat will now be able to rapidly and seamlessly deploy instances for on-demand workloads, dev-test, and cloud bursting – all with the simplicity, scalability, agility and unique per-minute billing of Azure. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 and 7.2 images are now live in all regions, except China and US Government, and can be deployed from the Azure Marketplace.

Azure Container Service builds on Microsoft’s previous work with Docker and Mesosphere to provision clusters of Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) onto which containerized applications can be deployed, orchestrated and provisioned – making it easier to create and manage clusters of Azure VMs pre-configured with open source components. Now in public review, Azure Container Service can be trialed here.

Partnering with Walmart and their WalmartLabs team, Microsoft is enabling OneOps on Azure, which offers an open-source cloud and application lifecycle management platform. Available from today, OneOps in combination with Red Hat Enterprise Linux images allows organizations to deploy to Azure with 100% open source products.