Microsoft joins Cloud Foundry Foundation To Strengthen Open Source Commitment

Microsoft has officially joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) as a gold member, extending its commitment to innovation in the open source community.

The two organisations will now work more closely together to provide further integrations for customers and the partnership will strengthen Microsoft’s links with other Cloud Foundry members such as Pivotal and SAP.

The CFF is a non-profit organisation that aims to drive awareness and adoption of the open source Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology, with a philosophy of providing ‘ubiquitous and flexible’ cloud computing.

Cloud control

Corey Sanders, director of compute for Microsoft Azure, joined Cloud Foundry’s executive director Abby Kearns on stage at the Cloud Foundry Summit in Santa Clara this week to make the announcement, where he outlined some of the new Azure integrations.

For example, the Cloud Foundry CLI has been added to the default list of tools in Azure Cloud Shell for authenticated administration available from anywhere and Cloud Foundry users now have access to support for Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL services.

Further updates include integrations with Microsoft Operations Management Suite Log Analytics to collect system and application metrics and with the Azure Cloud Provider Interface which contains all of the infrastructural elements required to run Cloud Foundry.

“Cloud Foundry on Azure has seen a lot of customer success, enabling cloud migration with application modernization while still offering an open, portable and hybrid platform,” wrote Sanders in a blog post.

“The partnership with the Cloud Foundry Foundation extends our commitment to deeply collaborate and innovate in the open community. We remain committed to create a diverse and open technology ecosystem, to offer you the freedom to deploy the application solution you want on the cloud platform you prefer.”

Open source

Speaking to Silicon earlier in the year, Kearns spoke about the power of open source platforms as a way of bringing people from different backgrounds together, something which she believes is extremely important to foster innovation.

“Digital transformation is happening. The momentum’s already there and I think innovation is still going to continue,” she said. “But how it’s distributed and how we pull people together is one of the areas where I think open source can transcend all of that, because the real value of open source is collaborative R&D and collaborative development across orgnisations around the world.

“One of the things that I’m most passionate about is diversity being a requirement in innovation. Diversity of thought, diversity of people but also diversity of organisations. That’s where innovation comes into play and I think that’s the value of open source.”

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