Microsoft and Chef announced a partnership today focused on helping businesses automate their cloud workloads and move them into the Azure cloud. The partnership is built on a year’s worth of work done to integrate Chef’s platform with Microsoft’s technology.

As a part of the deal, Chef and Microsoft will work together to build more native automation tools for Azure, Visual Studio and Windows PowerShell DSC. This year, the two Seattle-area companies will be primarily focused on helping customers automate workloads across both on-premises infrastructure and Azure’s cloud, as well as easily migrate more of their workloads to Azure.

In addition, Chef will provide training to Microsoft’s sales staff to help them work with customers on automation, DevOps practices and Azure. Chef will also offer education on DevOps – a set of techniques and philosophies that brings together development and operations – across a variety of Microsoft channels including industry events, community meetups and digital channels. As part of that, the two companies are holidng a joint webinar on March 19 to demonstrate the technical integrations between Chef and Azure.

“High-velocity IT is DevOps, cloud, and automation – all of which are critical for businesses to continually meet and exceed digital customer demand,” Chef CEO Barry Crist said in a press release. “Our collaboration with Microsoft is all about bringing high-velocity IT to enterprises.”

It’s an important partnership for Microsoft’s cloud ambitions. Azure is most popular among large enterprises, and providing those companies with the tools to more easily migrate workloads into the public cloud from on-premises infrastructure should help Microsoft grow its business.