Most big companies use a combination of server technologies. So instead of stubbornly fighting this fact, Microsoft has come to embrace it by partnering with Mesosphere to bring more efficiencies to enterprise clouds. Normally, different technologies like Linux and Azure don’t play nice with each other when it comes to sharing resources, but Mesosphere enables “container orchestration” which means different technologies can share resources.
Currently this technology is only in proof of concept stage but there is a lot of promise here. Currently, companies who run both systems cannot take advantage of their idle resources if they happen to be allocated to a different server OS. By teaming up with Mesosphere, Microsoft has shown enterprises that their interests are at the core of Microsoft’s priorities.
For most of their existence, Microsoft has fought open sourced alternatives to any of their products, but now in the cloud age Microsoft sees a new way to provide the best service to their customers while embracing the open source community. A large part of this new behavior comes from the understanding that many enterprises have evaluated the costs of rebuilding their solutions and decided they need to stay with some Linux servers.
Now Microsoft can offer the customers Azure without requiring a new investment into server hardware. When Azure can share resources, enterprises have an easier time balancing their workloads and their budgets. Technologies like Mesos’ will be the future of how enterprises structure their servers, and for Microsoft to get in on this technology early is good for them and their customers.
