On a quest to expand its presence in the community-driven society, Microsoft has now joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation. The Redmond company is set to bring application modernisation techniques to the non-profit organisation through the latest move.
Microsoft has joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation as a Gold Member. This means that the Windows maker will sit alongside Google, Huawei, Ford, GE Digital, NTT, Philips and Swisscom.
“Microsoft and the Cloud Foundry community are deeply aligned around our mutual understanding of enterprise business and technical requirements and our commitment to help organisations modernise their applications without vendor lock-in,” said Corey Sanders, partner director, Microsoft, in a joint statement.
Strategic motive
Like any previous tie-ups, Microsoft has decided to go with the Cloud Foundry community with a strategic motive. While on one side the company has agreed to support the community by empowering its various initiatives, there are also plans to leverage the open source developments to enrich its Azure platform. This would be a win-win approach over time.
“By joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation, we will be able to work with members to contribute to Foundation initiatives and bring a wide range of solutions to Microsoft Azure for our customers and the community,” Sanders highlights.
Notably, Cloud Foundry — the open source multi-cloud application platform as a service (PaaS) governed by the Cloud Foundry Foundation — is already a first-class citizen on Azure. The core usage of the solution has also been increased whopping 300 percent on Azure.
“We share both a tremendous number of users and a common approach to the enterprise cloud,” said Abby Kearns, executive director, Cloud Foundry Foundation.
Developer interest in determination
Microsoft recently showed its huge focus towards open source. The company joined the Linux Foundation last November and became the leading open source contributor on GitHub. Moreover, it released the .Net Core code and upgraded Azure with open source tools.
However, with the Cloud Foundry on board, Microsoft has taken a major step ahead to gain interest of open source-supporting developers.
The cloud-centric PaaS is currently used by a large number of technology companies including Cisco, Dell EMC, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Google, IBM, SAP and SUSE among various others. Originally designed in 2009, the solution is written in Ruby, Go and Java. It can run applications in multiple cloud options, starting from Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google Cloud, OpenStack, VMware, VSphere.
