Microsoft and Red Hat are collaboratively exploring new initiatives aimed at enabling enterprises to more easily adopt containers. This includes native support for Windows Server containers on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Microsoft Azure, and SQL Server on Red
What are containers?
Container technologies help enterprise customers increase agility and drive digital transformation using hybrid cloud. It is this that Red Hat and Microsoft will extend support to. This will enable these new offerings across platforms and help IT organizations on their path to digital transformation.
Enterprises see the benefit in using containerized applications to run their mission-critical applications, but most IT organizations are not standardized on a single infrastructure stack. These heterogeneous environments often carry both Windows and Linux platforms, siloing applications and making it difficult for a business to adopt DevOps practices.
From now, Windows Server containers will be natively supported on Red Hat OpenShift, a container application platform that brings Docker and Kubernetes to the enterprise. Red Hat OpenShift will be the first container application platform built from the open source Kubernetes project to support both Linux and Windows Server container workloads in a single platform across the multiple environments of the hybrid cloud, breaking down silos and making it easier for enterprises to pursue their cloud-native agenda.
This capability was demonstrated at Red Hat Summit in May 2017, and is expected to be available as a Technology Preview in Spring 2018.