Microsoft Corp.’s love affair with open-source software marked another milestone today as the company joined with Linux provider Red Hat Inc. to announce the general availability of a native version of Red Hat’s OpenShift on Microsoft’s Azure cloud.

The companies said Azure Red Hat OpenShift is the first jointly managed OpenShift offering in the public cloud. The availability announcement is the culmination of plans revealed almost exactly one year ago and is another major endorsement of Kubernetes, the open-source technology that underlies OpenShift, as a fundamental building block of hybrid and multicloud architectures.

Azure Red Hat OpenShift is a jointly supported, jointly engineered version of OpenShift that “will be completely integrated and sold with Azure with customers able to leverage Azure credits,” said Brian Gracely, director of product strategy at Red Hat. “We think this is a big step in terms of the breadth of places OpenShift can be deployed.”

Kubernetes is the phenomenally successful orchestration manager for software containers, which are self-contained operating environments that encapsulate applications in a form that’s easy to run on many computing platforms. It’s the most rapidly adopted open-source platform in history.

OpenShift has been available on all major cloud platforms and a Red Hat-managed version called OpenShift Dedicated has run on Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google LLC clouds for some time. “We had every intention of running OpenShift Dedicated on Azure, then Microsoft came to us and said they wanted a more integrated offering,” Gracely said. “They look at this as being their enterprise Kubernetes service.”

Azure customers will be able to take advantage of on-demand pricing with all provisioning, cluster management, updating, patching and security provided by Azure and Red Hat. Users get unified signup, on-boarding, service management and technical support. Charges will also be integrated into customers’ existing Azure bills.

The Azure version of OpenShift will also inherit Azure’s regulatory compliance with multiple standards validations and certifications. Red Hat said customers will have easier access to public cloud services such as Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Machine Learning and Azure SQL DB.

The companies also said they’re collaborating on containerized versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 on Azure, Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.8 and Ansible Certified modules. They also plan to jointly deliver SQL Server 2019 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.

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