The decades-old animosity between Microsoft Corp. and Red Hat Inc. is now officially in the past following the release of a new version of the Linux distributor’s cloud orchestration platform that features support for Azure. The addition completes the first leg of the partnership that the two technology giants announced last month to integrate their respective offerings in order to help joint customers better manage their heterogeneous infrastructure.

The alliance is the fruit of a much broader effort on the part of Redmond boss Satya Nadella to move his company away from its old proprietary ways and address the open-source software that organizations are increasingly relying upon in their environments. Linux in particular has emerged as a central focus of the push, with Microsoft recently upping the number of officially supported flavors on Azure to seven by adding Debian to the list. The partnership with Red Hat is set to see the latter’s namesake distribution follow suite within a few months alongside an option for existing customers to import licenses from their on-premise infrastructure.

The companies also plan to establish a joint support team in conjunction that will operate out of Microsoft’s Azure offices and provide a convenient troubleshooting line for Red Hat Enterprise Linux support support requests. On the distribution’s end, meanwhile, CloudForms will be further augmented to work with Windows Server and Hyper-V, thereby extending the compatibility to cover Redmond’s entire server stack.

Microsoft shops will be able to manage implementations the same way as the other parts of their infrastructure via the built-in administrative dashboard, which has also been updated as part of this week’s release to provide more granular visibility into the components of a cloud environment. That includes containers running on Red Hat’s OpenShift Enterprise middleware cloud, which can now be monitored all the way down to the host layer.

Image via DasWortgewand