In light of Microsoft making the Azure Container Service generally available to the public a couple of days ago, Mark Russinovich sat down to give a little insight to Azure Cloud and the reason that they embraced the open source community.
According to Mark, developers of Azure cloud sat down right from the start and asked themselves exactly how they wanted to approach creating their own container. Customers wanted a container service for the cloud service. Instead of making something themselves, they began collaborating with Mesosphere’s open source community. Azure and Mesos had also partnered up in the past to pool resources with Linux. Developing the container service with Mesos had a lot of advantages for Azure. It opened the project for the larger community to be involved and enabled users to port easily back and forth between the two.
Mark is proud of Microsoft embracing the open source communities. The Azure team has provided more than their fair share when it comes to contributing back to open sources, being the top contributor for Docker and Hadoop. With the new MVP award system, Azure also recognizes contributors that provide exceptional information and content. On Github, they push out samples of source codes, SDKs, and documentation allowing partners from around the world to craft with them.
Their involvement with the open source community means that they can provide first class support. In fact, it was Mark that asked attendees at the All Things Open Conference last October to pass their resumes forward, making it clear that any open source experts were welcome to apply for a position with Azure. With the cultural transformation that the cloud has been able to provide for global technology, the team has become very committed to open collaboration that will help customers transition to the cloud and make the most of IT trends.
