Welcome to our third episode
of Inside Azure for IT.
I'm Erin Chapple, CVP of Azure
Core Product and Design.
We will focus this episode
on discussing two of my favorite subjects:
open-source and Linux.
Open source plays
a critical role in enterprise
digital transformation.
For over a decade,
Microsoft has fully
adopted an open source approach
as part of our own
digital transformation,
as well as bringing together
customers, partners
and communities to innovate
on open-source technologies.
Before we dive in, remember
this is part one of a three part episode.
In part two, I speak with
Krishna Ganugapati
and Brendan Burns at Microsoft
about the key innovations
coming from Azure
with Linux and open-source services,
and we discussed Mariner,
Azure's own internal Linux distribution
that engineers use
to build services on.
In part three, I chat with Sarah Novotny
about running open-source
technologies in the cloud,
the relationship between IT
and developers to enable
open-source innovation,
and Microsoft's leadership
and contributions
to help secure open-source software.
A big part of Linux and open-source
strategy is to drive deep product
integration with Linux partners
so we can build faster and scale faster
to meet customers' needs.
In this segment,
we're discussing our long-term
partnership with Red Hat.
Now I'd like to bring on Mike Evans, VP,
Technical Business Development,
and Xavier Lecauchois,
Senior Director,
Ansible Cloud Services from Red Hat
to join me and talk about what
we're doing together
to help customers with their
cloud adoption journey.
Mike and Xavier, welcome.
It's so great to have you join us.
Great to be here Erin.
Thanks for having us, Erin.
Now, Mike,
the joint goal of our partnership
has been to help customers
simplify the path to cloud adoption
by building end to end solutions,
combining the product's strengths
from both companies to meet their needs.
How would you describe
where we are in the partnership?
In the big picture
when it comes to cloud adoption,
for the most part,
it's no longer a question about someone
utilizing cloud or not.
Now it's about what
workloads exist where
which ones need to stay on premise
for latency or policy reasons,
which ones are best
to build in a cloud native fashion,
which ones are flexible
to be run in either location,
and which application
should span both on premise
and in the cloud?
And having served enterprise
customers for decades,
both Microsoft and Red Hat
deeply understand
the importance of giving customers
the benefit of choice and flexibility
for their cloud adoption goals.
A very large percentage of customers use
mixtures of both Red Hat
and Microsoft Technologies,
and for Red Hat and Microsoft,
creating solutions
that allow them to better
use them together
was a foundation of our partnership.
Our collaboration has brought to market
a rich set of offerings.
For example, together
we made Red Hat Enterprise Linux,
a native offering
on Azure.
We enabled SQL Server on Red
Hat Enterprise Linux,
both on prem and in the cloud.
We also jointly developed
Azure Red Hat OpenShift
as a first party service,
which is a container Kubernetes based
offering and JBoss Middleware on Azure,
so that customers can modernize
their existing workloads in the cloud
and or build new cloud native apps.
In addition to deep understanding
of enterprise customers,
both Microsoft and Red
Hat have extensive experiences
working with large partner ecosystems,
including solution integrators
ISVs, Resellers, and hardware partners,
and we're able to take advantage of that
to better serve the customer.
Now, also pretty
unique to our partnership
is the fully integrated support
we offer to quickly address
customer issues with
co-located support staff
from both companies
with a single ticketing system
and a coordinated resolution process.
Now, Mike, you mentioned customer
decisions are now about what
workloads to run where.
As customers decide that,
what are some of their key
technology needs?
From being at Red Hat for 21 years,
I've seen the evolution
and adoption of Linux and other open
source based technologies
in terms of both in customer
use very widely,
as well as inclusion
in almost every aspect of computing
from handheld devices
and embedded systems
through the entire networking
and internet infrastructure,
all the way back to demanding Enterprise
and Telco data centers
And Red Hat customers
want and need a secure and reliable base
operating platform,
which has now evolved
to include both Linux plus, containers,
Kubernetes, middleware,
runtime technologies.
It also includes a wide variety
of programing languages and frameworks
that enable people
to build a very broad range
of application types.
More than ever, customers
tell us they need to ensure
that the foundation of their technology
stack is secure, reliable and supported.
And customers want that
same reliable and compatible
base set of technologies,
no matter where they run
their applications,
whether it's on prem,
in the public cloud
or both or in both places,
and they want it on the widest range
of underlying hardware
and public cloud foundations.
That's so true.
Most enterprise customers
adopt a hybrid cloud strategy,
and when it comes to hybrid,
customers are looking
for flexibility and consistency
to seamlessly deploy and run
applications across their environments.
We launched the Azure Hybrid Benefit
to make the migration of Red
Hat Enterprise Linux
to Azure frictionless,
making it easy to move on prem Red
Hat Enterprise Linux licenses
to Azure and reduce costs.
The latest innovation
we are working on to enable
customer success in hybrid
cloud is the launch of Red Hat Ansible
Automation platform on Azure.
Xavier, can you tell us more about that?
Erin, I'm really happy
to talk about that.
So rather than some automation
platform on Azure,
a new managed application
offering of the Ansible
automation platform,
including integration
with native Azure services.
At Red Hat, Ansible is the foundational
technology
for hybrid cloud automation,
the Azure managed application
model allows us to bring
the full Ansible Automation
experience to Azure users,
including integration
with those native Azure services
such as Azure Arc, Active Directory
or Azure PostgresSQL.
This offering has been developed
together and security
tested in partnership
between Microsoft and Red Hat.
It's really exciting to hear.
You know, for any operation
teams focused on continuous IT
governance, automation infrastructure,
provisioning alone will not be enough.
And Red Hat Ansible
Automation platform on Azure
not only gives DevOps and ITOps
the ability
to govern at scale
every aspect of that
application lifecycle.
But it also lets NetOps,
and SecOps and FinOps
automate the multitude of tasks
that must be executed
independent of the application delivery.
Now I know hybrid cloud
automation continues
to be a huge challenge
for many customers.
What are we trying to achieve
with this new offering
and how do customers coherently manage
their hybrid resources
without using a tool so complex?
Well, getting that right mix
between power user features
and end of use features was something
we thought a lot about
when we were creating Azure Arc,
and I'm sure that must have
come up with Ansible too.
That's right.
So our goal with this
new mode of deployment
is really to offer customers
a native cloud experience
to quickly deploy,
automate and manage azure resources
along with their broader
IT ecosystem of resources
and applications.
And there are some key benefits
that customers really experience
when they deploy the automation
platform on Azure.
The first one that comes to mind
is what we like to call
“Zero to Automation in Minutes”.
The major application is enabled
right from the Azure marketplace
to an optimized deployment
that leverages the Azure cloud services.
As part of the full Ansible
automation platform,
it also includes the Ansible Azure
certified collection
with close to 250 unique
integrations with Azure services.
So it's deliver out of the box
hybrid cloud automation,
allowing full stack
automation from Azure
to on prem resources.
And lastly, I'd like to also highlight
the fact that we have
been working together
with the team at Microsoft
to make sure that these
new model of deployment
is fully integrated with Azure Arc,
so we can seamlessly provide
that line of sight
to on prem resource management.
Now, customers have told us
that they prefer to use
a single pane of glass to manage
these systems across
their hybrid environments.
And this really helps them
take advantage of Azure
native capabilities
that range from inventory
to tagging, to search,
to add scale policy and governance
with that zero touch configuration.
So it's really exciting
that we are bringing this to the market.
Xavier, could you share,
you know, when this new Ansible
offering on Azure
will be available to customers?
Absolutely.
We announced the private preview
on December eighth.
It was received very well
with a great amount of customer interest,
and the feedback we received
has been extremely valuable to us
in ramping up to broader availability.
So we anticipate the availability
of a gated offering in North America
through the Azure
marketplace sometime around
Azure Open Source Day on February 15.
And speaking of Azure Open Source Day,
I'm looking forward
to demoing this new product
in our Red Hat session at the event.
I'm looking forward
to seeing you and others
at the Azure Open Source Day.
And if you haven't, make sure to register
for the event at the link below.
We'll be sharing all things
Linux and open source at the event.
You will sure not want to miss it.
Now, Mike, Xavier,
thank you so much
for coming onto Inside Azure for IT!
I'm so excited to see how customers
are able to achieve more
because of our partnership,
and I'm looking forward
to our collective opportunity ahead.
Thank you so much for having us, Erin.
Thanks, Erin.
It was great to catch people
up on our work together,
and as I look back
in the last five years working together
on the partnership with Microsoft,
I really feel we have a strong
and robust set of offerings now.
And customers now have confidence
that Red Hat and Microsoft together
can both give them high
quality products and support them,
which is something
people were skeptical about
when we first started
working together five years ago.
So cloud computing has changed
the world and has helped
make Red Hat and Microsoft good partners.
It's so exciting
and I just look forward to even more.
Be sure to check out the other segments
of this episode of Inside Azure for IT,
with Sarah Novotny,
Krishna Ganugapati, and Brendan Burns.
And for all our videos, deep dives
and skilling content,
head to
Azure.com/InsideAzureforIT.
I'll see you next time.