At the Red Hat Summit 2018, Red Hat and Microsoft expanded their relationship with a new agreement to bring managed OpenShift services to Microsoft Azure. OpenShift is Red Hat’s own distribution of Kubernetes.

From a technology perspective, the two companies will be working together on OpenShift on Azure to reduce the complexity of container management for customers. From a customer perspective, Red Hat and Microsoft will jointly manage the solution for customers, with support from both companies.

Customers get access to the Azure public cloud with the flexibility and control of OpenShift on-premises on Azure Stack. Users will be able to run their workloads on Windows containers alongside Red Hat Enterprise Linux containers, using a uniform orchestration platform. Not only that, users will be able to use SQL Server as a Red–Hat–certified container for deployment on Red Hat OpenShift on Azure and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform across the hybrid cloud.

Under the partnership, users will be able to use Microsoft tools with Red Hat, and Visual Studio Enterprise and Visual Studio Professional subscribers will get Red Hat Enterprise Linux credits. For the first time, developers can work with .NET, Java, or the most popular open source frameworks on this single supported platform.

Red Hat OpenShift on Azure is anticipated to be available in preview in the coming months. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Azure, and Azure Stack are currently available.