Azure and OSS

Ishan jain June 27, 2019 12:06

Azure is the perfect could platform for running Open Source either as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS) workloads.

Disclaimer: Currently I am employed by Microsoft, but my views and thoughts are still my own. The reason I joined Microsoft was, the work Microsoft have been doing for last couple of years in Open Source Space. Today I am a advocate for Open Source representing Microsoft.

Azure offers basic IaaS services like "Linux VM". Azure also offers several services that have open source core, i.e. database engines, docker management, tools for deploying infrastructure. There are also PaaS offerings in Azure which offers multiple capabilities for running open source workloads.

Below is a list of some of Azure's open sources offerings:

IaaS:

Red Hat
Suse
Ubuntu
CentOS
Debian

PaaS:

Azure Database for MySQL
Azure Database for MariaDB
Azure Database for PostgreSQL
Azure Cache for Redis
Hadoop (HDInsights)
Spark (Databricks)
Kubernates (AKS)
Azure Sphere
SignalR

PaaS capable of running open source workloads:

App Service
Functions
Machine Learning

Tools for deploying infrastructure:

Ansilbe
Teraform
Chef
Puppet

As I see it, Microsoft's mission is not to lock in customers with proprietary services in Azure, but by providing better services then the competition.