How Microsoft and Red Hat Are Collaborating on Cloud Migrations (siliconangle.com) 25
SiliconANGLE looks at how starting in 2021, Microsoft and Red Hat have formed "an unlikely partnership set to reshape the landscape of cloud computing..."
First, their collective open-source capabilities will lead to co-developed solutions to simplify the modernization and migration of Red Hat technologies to the cloud, seamlessly integrating them with Microsoft's Azure platform, according to João Couto, EMEA VP and COO of cloud commercial solutions at Microsoft. "We have acquired GitHub, which is also one of the largest repositories of open source worldwide," he said. "In that context, it makes a lot of sense to work together with Red Hat."
Transcribed from their interview: What we have been doing so far is making sure that we are co-developing solutions together with Red Hat. And making these solutions available to our customers — making it easy for customers to transform, to modernize [their] Red Hat technology running on-prem, and moving them into cloud using our own Microsoft cloud technology, but Red Hat solutions, in a very, very seamless, integrated way. And also leveraging all the entire portfolio of Red Hat automation tools, so that they can make it easier for customers not just to do the migration, but also to do management, run the operation, and all the troubleshooting also from the customer-care perspective. So that's basically an end-to-end partnership approach that we are taking...
"[Customers] get an integrated support experience from Red Hat technical teams and Microsoft technical teams. And this means that these two technical teams are often colocated, so whenever a customer has a challenge, they are being answered by Microsoft and Red Hat technical teams, all working together to solve this challenge from the customer. So this brings also an increased level of confidence to customers to move to cloud...
"We have both engineering teams from both sides working together to achieve this level of integration between the two solutions. So when you talk about Red Hat Enterprise Linux or when you have the Azure Red Hat OpenShift, which is a new solution that we have recently launched — these are solutions that using open source, are bringing in an additional level of integration, flexibility, automation to customers. So that they can migrate, and manage, their solutions in a more seamless way, and in a more easy way. So we are embedding this kind of overlying partnership from an open source perspective to bring these innovations live to customers."
Transcribed from their interview: What we have been doing so far is making sure that we are co-developing solutions together with Red Hat. And making these solutions available to our customers — making it easy for customers to transform, to modernize [their] Red Hat technology running on-prem, and moving them into cloud using our own Microsoft cloud technology, but Red Hat solutions, in a very, very seamless, integrated way. And also leveraging all the entire portfolio of Red Hat automation tools, so that they can make it easier for customers not just to do the migration, but also to do management, run the operation, and all the troubleshooting also from the customer-care perspective. So that's basically an end-to-end partnership approach that we are taking...
"[Customers] get an integrated support experience from Red Hat technical teams and Microsoft technical teams. And this means that these two technical teams are often colocated, so whenever a customer has a challenge, they are being answered by Microsoft and Red Hat technical teams, all working together to solve this challenge from the customer. So this brings also an increased level of confidence to customers to move to cloud...
"We have both engineering teams from both sides working together to achieve this level of integration between the two solutions. So when you talk about Red Hat Enterprise Linux or when you have the Azure Red Hat OpenShift, which is a new solution that we have recently launched — these are solutions that using open source, are bringing in an additional level of integration, flexibility, automation to customers. So that they can migrate, and manage, their solutions in a more seamless way, and in a more easy way. So we are embedding this kind of overlying partnership from an open source perspective to bring these innovations live to customers."
Unlikely partnership? (Score:5, Interesting)
MSFT is a cloud provider. Red Hat is a Linux distribution controlled by IBM. They cooperate on migrating stuff into MSFT's cloud. What's unlikely about that?
Microsoft itself is not stuck on Windows Server, they know it's a dying product. They get more cloud utilization this way. Red Hat keeps their brand of Linux available in places they hope to retain market share. Both of them are doing what they can to remain relevant in a world where neither is in great shape for the future.
Re: (Score:2)
MSFT is a cloud provider. Red Hat is a Linux distribution controlled by IBM. They cooperate on migrating stuff into MSFT's cloud. What's unlikely about that?
Microsoft itself is not stuck on Windows Server, they know it's a dying product. They get more cloud utilization this way. Red Hat keeps their brand of Linux available in places they hope to retain market share. Both of them are doing what they can to remain relevant in a world where neither is in great shape for the future.
Good bye RedHat, it was nice knowing ya, I suppose someone is going to do well personally after joining with Microsoft's catch and kill program. But it won't be RedHat.
Re: (Score:2)
The kill-off of CentOS probably was their jump the shark moment, this is just fuel on the fire. Selling enterprise licenses requires you to have people who are interested in deploying your OS and have used it before. Microsoft knew this, that's why the 426-xxxxxxx license codes for Windows NT 4. Everyone could install it wherever they wanted, they'd catch up on licenses later. CentOS was a pretty good gateway drug for RHEL. Replacements aren't 1:1 compatible with Red Hat. Now they will fade into irrel
Re:Unlikely partnership? (Score:5, Interesting)
I doubt that most people who were on CentOS migrated to RHEL. If they were pissed off about the OS support changes as I was, they probably moved to Ubuntu or another RHEL clone like AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux.
Personally, I migrated to Amazon Linux because I'm in AWS anyway, but that's not the ideal solution for on-prem servers.
Re: (Score:2)
At least it got you used to the rpm based distros. apt and other package managers aren't much like it. And having CentOS out there meant all the people running RHEL inside the enterprise could run CentOS at home. It was pretty perfect until some bean counter thought it was robbing them sales of their OS.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
windows server will never die. active directory is just too popular
Re: (Score:2)
Microsoft itself already migrated it to Linux. It's called Azure AD. The days of the on-prem server from MSFT are numbered.
Re: (Score:2)
The days of the on-prem server from MSFT are numbered.
On a sane world, that would mean the days of MSFT are numbered.
Re: (Score:2)
entra is not a drop in replacement for AD [jumpcloud.com]
Re: (Score:2)
In their mad rush to increase their cloud utilization to 'beat' AWS, you'll be pushed harder and harder toward that.
Re: (Score:2)
In case you missed it - IBM owns Red Hat. IBM and Microsoft are long-time rivals.
Not sure why Microsoft's cloud is called "Azure", though.... Big Kinda Blueish?
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Allegedly it is named that because of the color being related to the sky where the clouds are.
I think it's half that, and half that we're short on available short names for things that aren't already strongly associated with an idea in people's minds, and/or already a registered trademark.
because (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Do you think that kind of rah-rah bullshit means anything when money is at stake?
Re: (Score:2)
No, the Linux Foundation is now pwned by Microsoft, IBM and many other corporations. Plus thece corporations are doing all they can to eliminate the GPL and FSF.
Re: (Score:2)
> What's unlikely about that?
IBM is also a cloud provider, and is nothing like it was.
Red Hat in Azure has been pricey for a while though. It isn't the market that I'd expect them to tap into either. Red Hat isn't in favour with a large group of users since CentOS disruption, again looks weird that they'd find this a good target audience.
Any modernisation I'd expect to be towards any other distro.
Re: Unlikely partnership? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
From the internal perspective, they can't retain talent if the stock isn't going up, and if they can't hit numbers quarterly their stock tanks.
It's not like going out of business but it would start a crisis of relevance similar to the end of Ballmer's reign.
Red Hat's nickel and diming reminds me of IBM RT (Score:5, Interesting)
I find it odd that Wikipedia has filed this under "IBM RT PC". I do not believe IBM ever called it a PC, it was sold by their business computing unit. Even at the time I could see what it could be, but it never was because of how the OS was broken into a million pieces because IBM thought this approach would maximize license fees. They apparently have not learned much in over 40 years.
seamlessly integrating .... (Score:2)
Hopefully people will learn:
"The cloud" doesn't mean mean "someone else's computer" it means "everyone else's computer".
I (mis)read this as (Score:2)
Probably just as accurate.
Can't just speak English, eh? (Score:2)
If you can't explain how you add value, then you don't.
If you need to use 3 words that are the same thing, you're not really saying anything. You're filling space.
"Our tool is so hard to use that we had to create a special group to fix it. But we can't say that here."
"We're going to mention how we're physically near each other as a positive, instead of that our remote tools suck so bad we had to switch to in person."
FTFY - IBM and Microsoft Cloud blah blah blah (Score:2)