Microsoft Corp. is open-sourcing one of its most important pieces of software, Service Fabric.

The software is the foundational technology that powers the core infrastructure of its Azure cloud platform, as well as other services such as Skype for Business, Intune, Azure Event Hubs, Azure Data Factory, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL Database, Dynamics 365 and Cortana.

This week, the software giant said it’s making Service Fabric available under the MIT license. The project will transition to an open development process on GitHub in coming months, officials said.

Service Fabric is a microservices platform. It’s designed to make it easy for developers to package, deploy, manage and scale up reliable microservices and software containers. It means that developers don’t have to concern themselves with managing their infrastructure, and can instead just focus on the performance of their microservices and container-based apps.

Service Fabric delivers highly available and durable services at cloud scale by analyzing the available infrastructure and resource requirements of the apps that run on it. This enables automatic scaling, rolling upgrades and self-healing whenever problems occur. The platform also competes with the Kubernetes project to some extent, since both can serve as orchestration platforms that can package, deploy and maintain container-based applications.

The software is currently available on Windows, Windows Server, Linux and Linux on Azure. Microsoft has said in the past that it also intends to make Service Fabric available on rival public clouds.

The Linux version of Service Fabric’s repository is already available on GitHub, along with its related build and test tools. Microsoft said the Windows version will be migrated soon, which means anyone who wants to contribute to the project can do so.

The move is just the latest step in Microsoft’s about-turn with regards to open-source software, a shift that began in earnest when its current Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella took over the reins back in 2014. There are several reasons behind Microsoft’s decision to embrace open-source software, Rebecca Wettemann, vice president at analyst firm Nucleus Research, told SiliconANGLE. These reasons include the need to appeal to more developers and encourage them to move their workloads to its Azure cloud.

“In a competitive cloud environment where developers vote with their workloads, Microsoft needs to embrace open source to compete against Amazon and the like,” Wettemann said. She added that Microsoft’s support for open-source software also gives it a better pitch than some of its competitors in the apps space that insist on using proprietary programming languages, such as Salesforce.com, Inc.

Microsoft has previously open-sourced certain components of Service Fabric, including its ASP.NET Core integration libraries. But the company now plans to open source the entire runtime, as well as build environments for Linux and Windows.

The company will retain overall control of the project, however. “Microsoft owns the project and the Service Fabric team will be the governing body that decides the direction of the project,” the Service Fabric Team wrote in a blog post. “As the governing body, it will be our responsibility to follow the guidance of the community. That said, we’re not ruling out the possibility of donating it to a foundation in the future.”

Image: Microsoft