Microsoft is continuing its foray into the world of open source by joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation.
The move to join the Foundation, which is the non-profit organisation behind the Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service project, is the latest in a growing list of open source projects that Microsoft is involved with.
Microsoft has already moved to embrace open source Linux offerings, is working with Red Hat increasingly closely, and has become an increasingly prominent figure in the Open Compute project.
This latest move sees Microsoft join as a Gold Member along with the likes of Google and Huawei.
What this means is that Microsoft will be creating closer ties between its Azure cloud and Cloud Foundry. The Gold membership should ensure that the Redmond company will donate both time and money towards Cloud Foundry’s development.
Corey Sanders, director of compute at Azure, wrote in a blog post: “We remain committed to create a diverse and open technology ecosystem, to offer you the freedom to deploy the application solution you want on the cloud platform you prefer.”
As well as giving Microsoft a considerable image boost, the move always helps to provide customers with flexibility of choice. For Cloud Foundry the growing engagement with public cloud providers, particularly those of the size of Microsoft, hands them greater credibility when trying to appeal to those large enterprise businesses.
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Work has already started on providing Azure to Cloud Foundry integrations, two of which we announced last month at Microsoft Build.
Microsoft announced Cloud Foundry CLI in Azure Cloud Shell, and support for AzureDatabase for MySQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL services.
Other moves to bring together the Azure platform with the Cloud Foundry platform include the Azure Cloud Provider Interface, Azure Meta Service Broker, Visual Studio Team Services plugin, and Microsoft Operations Management Suite Log Analytics.
