Microsoft and Red Hat together announced that Red Hat's software, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and the JBoss app server, will be fully supported on Azure.

While Azure has hitherto been an officially supported platform for other Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, CentOS, Oracle Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE, RHEL has always been missing from this list. With Red Hat being arguably the most important distribution in the enterprise space, this has been a significant gap in Azure's Linux support.

That gap is now closing. Azure will become a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Services Provider. In the coming months, Red Hat system images will become available to buy on a pay-as-you-go basis through the Azure Marketplace. In the meantime, Red Hat Cloud Access subscribers will be able to provide their own virtual machine images for running in Azure.

As well as supporting Red Hat's software stack on Azure, the companies will collaborate in other ways. They will create a colocated support team that has both Azure and Red Hat skills to help companies with deployments and migrations. The companies will ensure interoperability between Red Hat CloudForms, Azure, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager, enabling both CloudForms and SCVMM to be used to manage Hyper-V and Azure-based workloads . RHEL will also become the reference platform for .NET on Linux.