In the true spirit of open source, Red Hat has updated its OpenShift platform-as-a-service to support .NET applications and added SQL Server to the list of available databases on the solution. Implemented with the help of Seattle-based integration startup Uhuru Software, the enhancements represent a major push into Microsft territory and confirmation that the enterprise Linux giant is willing to venture beyond familiar grounds in order to close the gap on competitors.

“Developers want choice. So as much as we have affinity and we have expertise developing in the Linux arena and Java with the JBoss technologies, we want to make sure we have an opportunity to reach out to folks using Ruby or GNOME or other languages and frameworks like Python and Perl and PHP,” Ashesh Badani, the head of Red Hat’s cloud business, told SiliconANGLE in a December interview (see the entire segment below).

By making it possible for users to run their .NET and SQL Server workloads on OpenShift, the firm is substantiating its much-touted commitment to enabling flexibility in application delivery. As part of this effort, the integrations have been included in OpenShift Origin, the upstream open source project on which the company’s commercial PaaS offerings are based. And unsurprisingly, the next phase of the collaboration between Red Hat and Uhuru will be baking the functionality directly into the Online and Enterprise editions of the platform, partner ecosystem technical director Chris Morgan revealed in a blog.

Amazon, Microsoft and Google are all pursuing similar roadmaps with their cloud offerings, prioritizing languages and technologies based on adoption, but Red Hat is going one step further and providing a “standardized application environment with consistent administration capabilities,” according to Morgan. Plus, code contributed by Uhuru facilitates multi-tenancy on Windows nodes by isolating applications from their neighbors.

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