Microsoft and Red Hat are known to have been competing in the Operating System space. However, a few years ago both realised customers are using Windows and Red Hat, Java and .Net at the same time and many customers were asking for them to work together.
More than 95% of fortune 500 companies trust Azure to run their services with almost 100% of those companies in Banking, Airlines and Healthcare sector relying on RHEL.
This led to a partnership between Microsoft and Red Hat. They have been working closely on developing as well as supporting the solutions since then.
Initially Microsoft and Red Hat started working together on number of smaller solutions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for Hyper-V and RHEL for Azure.
Overtime they have added to support OpenShift, JBoss, Ansible and SQL Server for RHEL and RHEL for SAP solution in Azure.
Having two widely deployed Operating Systems in the industry provides powerful solution and benefits to customers who need to co-mingle RHEL and Windows applications and workloads on Azure.
Customers will also have two enterprise companies standing behind that with dedicated onsite technical support. With this, customers will call one number for support without worrying if it’s RedHat or Microsoft issue.
Let’s consider OpenShift on Azure. It’s cost effective, easy, and fast to deploy and provides a completely managed service that allows customers to focus on their application first.
One real-world example worth mentioning is Lufthansa. Lufthansa uses the entire OpenShift on Red Hat Enterprise Linux stack running on Azure. As a result, they could see a 50% cost reduction.
One more benefit is minimal deployment time. Deutsche bank, which moved to a combined Microsoft Azure and Red Hat OpenShift service, were able to get their proof of concept to production time down to three weeks.
Running Red Hat OpenShift on Azure is an Azure first party service jointly engineered, managed and supported by Red Hat and Microsoft. It inherits all of Azure’s compliance and allows customers to use their Azure billing.
When Microsoft and Red Hat work together on solutions for enterprise customers, customers get better integrations, better support, and jointly they are able to solve problems and provide an end-to-end solution.
