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What was once an oddity in the Microsoft world is now common practice. The company is no longer the enemy of open source technology but has now fully embraced the software and is also contributing to it as well.

Today, Microsoft and Red Hat have announced that they are deepening their relationship and are working together to make it easier to run containers in your environment. The two companies are working together to bring native support for Windows Server containers on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Microsoft Azure, and SQL Server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift.

Microsoft is betting big on containers as their value is starting to materialize with the minimal overhead needed to run applications. Last month, the company announced Azure Containers Instances which streamlines the process of deploying containers without the need for an underlying virtual machine.

This is not the first time that Microsoft has worked with Red Hat, they initially partnered with the company back in 2015 to bring some of the company’s software to Azure.

This collaborations between Microsoft and Red Hat is significant as very few IT organizations are homogenous. With organizations running OpenShift soon having the ability to natively run Windows Server containers, this makes the container platform the first to both support Linux apps and Windows Server on a single platform; this functionality is expected to arrive in the Spring of 2018.

On the Microsoft side of the coin, Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated is coming to Azure. This software is a dedicated container platform that is managed by Red Hat and is coming to all 42 regions when it reaches availability in early 2018.

And for the SQL Server fans, the relational database will be available in the coming months for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift

The announcements today by Microsoft and Red Hat solidify Microsoft’s commitment to the applications and not the underlying OS. By bringing OpenShift to Azure and SQL Server/Windows Containers to Red Hat’s platforms, Microsoft is making sure that it is putting its software where its users are, even if that means that they are living in a world now powered by Windows.