14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft, through Corey Sanders, has finally made public their latest Azure cloud offering after announcing a mysterious partnership with Red Hat back in November 2015.
So if you've been wondering what the two giants were planning all this time, we're informing you today that it's now possible to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) instances on the Azure cloud, as Microsoft has provided its customers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 and 7.2-based images on the Azure Marketplace.
In the announcement made on February 17, 2016, Microsoft brags with the fact that it loves Linux and that more than 60 percent of their Azure cloud images are based on Linux. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux offering comes exactly one year later after Microsoft's joint partnership with Canonical to deliver Ubuntu Linux on Azure.
"Both Microsoft and I love Linux," said Corey Sanders, director of Program Management, Azure at Microsoft. "Since we announced our partnership in November, we’ve seen strong interest and momentum from our customers looking to bring their Red Hat investments to Azure."
China and US Government have been excluded from the offering
For some reason that has not yet been revealed to us in the said announcement, Microsoft's new Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Azure offering is not available for China and US Government, but the rest of the world can seamlessly and rapidly deploy these instances straight from the Azure Marketplace.
Customers can use the Red Hat Enterprise Linux images for cloud bursting, dev-test, and on-demand workloads. Best of all, Red Hat and Microsoft provide co-located support to their Azure customers, helping them when they need it most. So if you love Microsoft's Azure cloud offering and have a soft spot Red Hat's Enterprise Linux, you can combine the two for your benefit.