Microsoft has become the most recent of the three top infrastructure-as-a-service providers to throw its weight behind Cloud Foundry with the release of a preview implementation that will allow users to take full advantage of the free middleware stack. The move marks the latest milestone in CEO Satya Nadella’s efforts to woo to developers and the open-source community in particular.

That strategy has previously seen Redmond contribute the source code for its .NET application framework to the public domain and acquire Revolution Analytics, Inc., a distributor of the world’s most popular open statistical programming language. The addition of support for Cloud Foundry is no less significant.

The ability to spin up a cluster of the project using standard commands will enable developers to take advantage of its proven automation capabilities in their applications instead of building out that functionality from scratch, which can save months of work. That makes Azure’s that much more attractive for large-scale application projects, while cementing Microsoft’s commitment to open software.

But the move is an even bigger testament to the strength of the free model, which has emerged as one of the biggest drivers of change in the enterprise over recent years. The fact that the traditionally proprietary-minded software giant is willing to overlook the fact that Cloud Foundry is maintained by a sister company of one of its top rivals, VMware Inc., demonstrates that this is more true than ever.

Now that all three major cloud operators support the project, the likely next step is the introduction of managed implementations. Microsoft, along with its infrastructure-as-a-service competitors, already offer pre-configured middleware services, which it would make sense to extend with Cloud Foundry given its broad feature set and popularity. The only question is which provider will push the first domino.

Photo by digitaldundee via Morguefile