After much anticipation, LinuxCon, ContainerCon and Cloud Open China is finally here. Some of the world’s top technologists and open source leaders are gathering at the China National Convention Center in Beijing to discover and discuss Linux, containers, cloud technologies, networking, microservices, and more. Attendees will also exchange insights and tips on how to navigate and lead in the open source community, and what better way than to meet in person at the conference?
To preview how some leading companies are using open source and participating in the open source community, Linux.com interviewed several companies attending LinuxCon China. Here, Microsoft discusses how and why they adopted open source, how that strategy helps their customers and the open source community, but also how it helps Microsoft innovate and change how it does business.
We spoke with Gebi Liang, Partner Director of Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise China Cloud Incubation Center to learn more.
Linux.com: What is Microsoft’s open source strategy today?
Gebi Liang: Our company mission is to enable companies to do more. An important step is enabling organizations to work on the tools and platforms they know, love and have already invested in. Thus, our strategy centers around providing an open and flexible platform that works the way you want and need it to. The platform integrates with leading ecosystems to deliver consistent offerings. But Microsoft went even further to release technology to support a strong ecosystem through Microsoft’s portfolio of investments, and to contribute technology to the open source community as well.
Shaping and deploying this strategy has been a multi-year journey. But each step along the way was significant including investing in open source contributions across the company and joining key foundations to deepen our partnerships with the community. We also made Linux and OSS run great and smoothly on Azure, and now one in three VMs on Azure are Linux. Microsoft teams forged key open source partnerships to bring more choice in solutions to Azure, such as Canonical, Red Hat, Pivotal, Docker, Chef and many more. Plus, we are also bringing many of our technologies into the open, or making them available on Linux.
Linux.com: What are some of Microsoft’s contributions in open source and as a platform?
Gebi Liang: We are making great progress in enabling and integrating open source, but also in contributing and releasing aspects.
First, while integrating open source solutions into our platforms, we collaborate with the community and contribute the code back to the community. Projects we contributed to is included , but not limited to: Linux and FreeBSD on Hyper-V, Hadoop, Windows container, Mesos and Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry and Openshift, various cloud deployment and management tools such as Chef & Puppet, and Hashicorp tools. Of course, there are many other projects too.