Hot on the heels of releasing new artificial intelligence services for Azure, Microsoft Corp. is again bolstering the cloud platform through a collaboration with Red Hat Inc. focused on software containers.

As part of the alliance, the duo this morning unveiled Red Hat OpenShift on Azure. It’s a managed version of the latter firm’s OpenShift platform, which enables companies to build portable software that harnesses containers’ ability to seamlessly move between different infrastructure.

This kind of portability is increasingly important as enterprises move more workloads to the cloud. Thanks to Microsoft’s collaboration with Red Hat, joint customers can set up an OpenShift deployment on Azure that contains the same application building blocks  their on-premise environments. Having a consistent foundation simplifies the task of moving a service from one deployment to another when the need arises.

Microsoft presumably hopes that Red Hat OpenShift on Azure will thus makes it easier for companies to draw upon its cloud services and, in the process, generate more revenue. In the same spirit, the company plans to make a containerized version of its SQL Server relational database available on the platform.

Another Microsoft product that will work with the offering is Azure Stack. It’s a software product that ships with appliances sold by the company’s hardware partners and enables organizations to create a copy of its cloud in their data centers.

Microsoft’s alliance with Red Hat has a go-to-market element as well. The companies plan to jointly support Red Hat OpenShift on Azure, meaning that customers won’t have to separately contact their technicians when they need to troubleshoot an issue.

“As a fully managed service, it will be kept up-to-date, with a single unified bill, integrated support experience, and in all respects a native Azure service,” Microsoft engineer Brendan Burns detailed in a blog post. “Our customers told us that this “one throat to choke” was incredibly important and missing from other cloud-based OpenShift offerings, so we’re happy to be able to meet that need.”

The announcement of the collaboration comes on the same day that Red Hat revealed a partnership with IBM Corp. likewise focused on OpenShift. The alliance will see the platform integrated into several of the latter company’s cloud and middleware products.

IBM and Microsoft both have the same basic objective, namely addressing the rapid adoption of containers. Gartner Inc. predicts that more than 50 percent of enterprises will run containerized applications in production by 2020, compared with less than 20 percent today.

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