For a look at exactly what that means, here’s what Microsoft detailed for the future of Azure during their partnership with Cloud Foundry. There’s a laundry list of changes either here or on the way that could be a huge help for Azure customers.

  It has been really exciting working with the community to bring together two thriving ecosystems, offering support for Azure tools and frameworks with Cloud Foundry. In fact, as we develop new services and capabilities in Azure, we offer Cloud Foundry integration from the first day of preview. Here are two examples of exciting integration with announcements from our Microsoft Build developers conference last month:

• Cloud Foundry CLI in Azure Cloud Shell – The Azure Cloud Shell embedded in the Azure portal puts a fully featured Bash shell at your fingertips on any device with a browser. Today, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve added the Cloud Foundry CLI to the list of tools installed in the Cloud Shell by default.
• Support for Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL services – With the new Azure Database offerings, you can now back your CF environment with a store that is fully managed, with automatic scaling and backup built in.

Here are a few other investments we have made to bring together the Azure platform with the Cloud Foundry platform:

• Azure Cloud Provider Interface – The Azure CPI provides integration between BOSH and the Azure infrastructure, including the VMs, virtual networks, and other infrastructural elements required to run Cloud Foundry. The CPI is continually updated to take advantage of the latest Azure features, including supporting Azure Stack.
• Azure Meta Service Broker – The Azure meta service broker provides Cloud Foundry developers with an easy way to provision and bind their applications to some of our most popular services, including Azure SQL, Azure Service Bus, and Azure Cosmos DB.
• Visual Studio Team Services plugin – The Cloud Foundry plugin for Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) provides rich support for building continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines for CF, including the ability to deploy to a CF environment from a VSTS hosted build agent, allowing teams to avoid managing build servers. And of course, the plug-in is open-source.
• Microsoft Operations Management Suite Log Analytics – Integration with Log Analytics in OMS allows you to collect system and application metrics and logs for monitoring your CF Application

The Cloud Foundry Foundation seems to be a great fit for the Microsoft Azure team, on account of their shared interest in helping the world adopt the Cloud as a service. Whether or not there will be more changes coming as a result of the partnership (barring the above) is yet to be seen, but we’re excited to keep an eye out for what kind of new features are in store.