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We are just days away from reaching a significant milestone for our team and the open source and open standards communities: the first anniversary of Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. (MS Open Tech) -- a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft.
We can’t think of anyone better to celebrate with than YOU, the members of the open source and open standards community and technology industry who have helped us along on our adventure over the past year.
We’d like to extend an open (pun intended!) invitation to celebrate with us on April 25, and share your burning questions on the future of the subsidiary, open source at-large and how MS Open Tech can better connect with the developer community to present even more choice and freedom.
I’ll be proud to share the stage with our amazing MS Open Tech leadership team: Jean Paoli, President; Kamaljit Bath, Engineering team leader; and Paul Cotton, Standards team leader and Co-Chair of the W3C HTML Working Group.
We will share personal anecdotes about how an unlikely pairing -- Microsoft and open source / open standards – may go down in history as successful as Chocolate & Peanut Butter, Cats & the Internet, and Pirates & Ninjas.
Come raise a toast to how far we have come as a community, and to the exciting places we’ll be headed in the next 12 months.
Find your ticket below, and register here http://congratsmsopentech.eventbrite.com.
Cheers,
Gianugo Rabellino Senior Director, Open Source Communities Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.
Any time you can open up a platform to more options for interoperability, it’s a great thing. It’s even better if the platform is as popular as Apache Hadoop and the new option is one that has been accepted as a popular choice. And earlier today, HortonWorks announced another interoperability achievement for the Apache Hadoop project on their blog by highlighting how Hadoop now runs natively on Microsoft Windows platforms:
“One of the things we believe strongly in here at Hortonworks is community driven open source and, obviously, the bigger the community, the better. The community opens itself up to new members by the developmental choices it makes and last week the Apache Hadoop community voted to significantly expand itself by agreeing to accept enhancements into the core trunk that make Apache Hadoop run natively on the Microsoft Windows platforms including Windows Server and Windows Azure. These enhancements were the result of many, many months of joint engineering work from Microsoft and Hortonworks and we are glad to see the community accept and embrace them. So far, as is common in the Apache Hadoop project, we developed these in a development branch for over a year and once this work was complete, the community voted to incorporate these changes into the mainline trunk.”
We at Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., want to congratulate the teams at the Apache Software Foundation, HortonWorks and Microsoft Corporation that made this happen! We’re excited to see where native support for Apache Hadoop on Windows Server and Windows Azure will take the community.
Today Scott Guthrie blogged about new releases of Microsoft’s Web developer tools that reflect a snapshot of improvements and contributions from the open source community and Microsoft Open Technologies Hub (The Hub). The latest updates from ASP.NET SignalR and Web API are good to go thanks to our cool collaboration.
All code submissions met a high bar before being merged into the source. These submissions were reviewed and tested by The Hub development team to ensure the project maintains the high quality and reliability that all of our customers demand.
Once shipped, these products are now officially fully supported by Microsoft Corp. and backed by its lifecycle. This approach is unique - allowing rapid open source innovation, while also providing continuity for Microsoft’s business customers.
Here’s a quick overview of the latest products and features, along with links to their open source repository homes. Please keep the feedback coming so we can continue to make these tools better together.
ASP.NET SignalR
ASP.NET SignalR provides real-time web functionality to applications, and may best be expressed by the description on the ASP.NET SignalR website:
“ASP.NET SignalR is a new library for ASP.NET developers that makes it incredibly simple to add real-time web functionality to your applications. What is "real-time web" functionality? It's the ability to have your server-side code push content to the connected clients as it happens, in real-time.”
The Hub support for ASP.NET SignalR comes with a long-term roadmap. As with the other open source projects in our portfolio, The Hub is dedicated to maintaining a high level of development resources for ASP.NET SignalR, as well as making the customer feedback loop better to allow growth of customer usage.
ASP.NET SignalR has an active community. Community contributions can be submitted to the ASP.NET SignalR GitHub repository. All code submissions will be reviewed and tested by The Hub to ensure the project remains high quality and reliable. Before accepting contributions a contributor must sign a contribution agreement. A contributor then submits their patch, which, if accepted, will be merge into the source.
ASP.NET Web API
The ASP.NET Web API now includes support for OData endpoints, with support for JSON.Light and custom conventions. Automated help page generation allows developers to quickly and easily create documentation for web APIs.
Get started with OData at http://www.asp.net/web-api/overview/odata-support-in-aspnet-web-api.
More details on automated help page generation can be found at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/yaohuang1/archive/2012/08/15/introducing-the-asp-net-web-api-help-page-preview.aspx.
Here at The Hub we are very excited to see new projects and updates continue to roll out with the help of the open source community. With your participation, we’re continuing to build open source engineering best practices. As we go ahead, we are looking forward to working even closer with open source projects and communities.
It's been just one month since Microsoft Open Technologies announced the early preview of VM Depot, a community-driven catalog of open source virtual machine images. Today we are proud to announce that the community has rallied to our call and already produced over 100 images. We are thrilled at the reception this preview has received and there are more images appearing every day. VM Depot, even in preview, is already a valuable resource for open source projects and their communities. On VM Depot the community can build, deploy and share their favorite Linux configuration, create custom open source stacks, work with others and build new architectures for the cloud that leverage the openness and flexibility of the Windows Azure platform.
We already have a range of base Linux distributions upon which you can build new images. These include, but are not limited to, Debian, Centos, Ubuntu and Mageia. There are images that include “big brand” open source projects such as WordPress, Drupal as well as developer stacks such as the LAMP, Ruby Stack and Apache Tomcat. All these are complemented nicely by more niche projects such as the Moodle course management system and PhPCompta, an accounting application adapted to Belgian legislation. Each day we are seeing more and more open source software published on VM Depot for deployment to Windows Azure. I can only thank the growing community for so fully embracing the VM Depot preview. It's great to arrive here at Microsoft just as this is taking off, I look forward to working with you as we go from strength to strength.
If you haven't already done so, now is a really good time to take a look at the ever growing range of images available. If you have an Azure subscription, you're ready to try it out, if not you can quickly sign up for a free 90-day trial subscription. In addition to being able to deploy from your Azure portal we have provided cross-platform command line tools that give you all the control you need. All we ask is that you remember this is a community effort so please rate and comment on any images you try out. This will help users find the best images and help maintainers ensure they are meeting user's needs.
Should the image you are looking for not be available yet you can let the community know via the VM Depot forums, with luck someone else will have the same need and publish their image for you. Alternatively, you can build and publish an image yourself. Instructions for publishing and managing images are available on the VM Depot website. If you need any assistance please post to the forums where I or another community member will be pleased to help you.
It is clear from the communities uptake of VM Depot that open source is front and center on Windows Azure, with your help we look forward to building on the early momentum this preview release has generated.
Here is great news for open source developers: Brian Harry announced today at the Microsoft’s ALM Summit that Git is now fully integrated into Visual Studio as well as the Team Foundation Service, Microsoft’s cloud-powered Application Lifecycle Management tool.
Here at Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., we are excited to hear such news as this offers more choice and flexibility to development teams. We happen to work on a daily basis with developers on Git in the context of projects such as Node, Dash, Redis or Solr so we totally get the goodness of this news.
The Visual Studio Tools for Git work great against Git repositories locally, in Team Foundation Service, on GitHub, CodePlex, BitBucket etc. That’s all because they are using Git as the distributed source control solution and they talk to Git repositories via the open source library LibGit2. LibGit2 is a portable C library that runs on many different platforms including Linux and Mac.
Microsoft engineers in Brian’s team have been contributing to LibGit2 for a number of months now as they worked with the community to add Git support in Visual Studio – some of them earning committer rights on this popular and very active open source project. Even better as the team started testing the integration, all the bug fixes and security fixes that they found also have been contributed back to the project.
Therefore not only is Brian’s announcement good news for developers in Visual Studio wanting to use Git to contribute to open source projects, it’s also great news for others building on top of the LibGit2 library on any platform.
The Visual Studio Tools for Git are provided as an extension for Visual Studio 2012 but Brian also says that they should be included in the box with all editions of Visual Studio in a future release – including the Express editions.
I can tell you MS Open Tech engineers can’t wait to take full advantage of the Visual Studio Tools for Git in their daily interaction and collaboration with the open source developers’ community.
I've been involved with open source software for just shy of 15 years now. During that time I've seen open source software become a fundamental part of technology innovation. It is that technology innovation that has fed me and my family for many years. I like to think I've given back and played a small part in the growth of open source software through my code contributions and my open source strategic consultancy services. But, today I am presented with an opportunity to give back even more. From today onwards I will be joining Microsoft UK, where I’ll be serving a global role supporting the amazing team at Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.
MS Open Tech, a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft, was set up to advance Microsoft's investment in openness - including interoperability, open standards and open source. Those of you who know me through my open source work will know just what this means, but for those who don't know me I guess a mini-bio might be in order.
I've held a variety of roles including software development, academic research, university lecturing and strategic consulting to both academic research community (via the OSS Watch service at the University of Oxford) and to the private sector (via OpenDirective, a small consultancy company). In all these roles open source software has been a fundamental part of my work. Through this work I've been able to contribute back to many projects, particularly within the Apache Software Foundation where I currently have the honour of standing on the Board of Directors.
More important than my history and my contributions, however, is what the open source experience has taught me. I can honestly say that I have learned far more from my open source engagements than I have in any other of my activities (including amazing experience such as being vice-captain of a national schoolboy sports team and not unsuccessful band manager). This new role is an opportunity to work in this new mixed IT world of devices and services; and play my part in maximizing Microsoft's investments in openness.
This is the first of many exciting days, I am sure. I look forward to telling you about others in the near future.
Ross Gardler
Microsoft UK (Supporting Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.)
By Gianugo RabellinoSenior Director Open Source CommunitiesMicrosoft Open Technologies, Inc.
As I write this, I’m exploring the public preview of VM Depot, a new service from Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. VM Depot is a community-driven catalog of open source virtual machine images for Windows Azure. On VM Depot the community can build, deploy and share their favorite Linux configuration, create custom open source stacks, work with others and build new architectures for the cloud that leverage the openness and flexibility of the Windows Azure platform.
The preview launch of VM Depot today is an introduction of things to come: you can already easily deploy different Linux-based virtual machines that include custom and curated installations and configurations. (We have the latest, full-fledged distributions of Debian, Alt Linux and Mageia for your hacking pleasure.) You can comment on them. You can rate them. And, what’s more, you can remix them to your liking and possibly share the results with other members of the community. Or why don’t you go ahead and just create a new one from scratch with your favorite software? For ultimate speed, you can quickly deploy images already customized for specific business scenarios. All this is just a few clicks away, completely free of charge and just waiting for your input to make it better. To learn more, see Getting Started with VM Depot.
VM Depot is another illustration of how the Azure platform is effectively open. As complex as it may seem, VM Depot was relatively easy to build as it relies exclusively on published Azure APIs. As we explore the meaning of openness and interoperability of cloud platforms, I can now say that Windows Azure is at the forefront of the debate and provides compelling proof that documented APIs can do wonders to enable building amazing new applications that leverage the cloud.
Some days you can’t help smiling. I had a big smile on my face back in June when Microsoft announced it was making preconfigured Linux images available in Windows Azure gallery and today I have another reason to be happy as I see how Microsoft Open Technologies is helping open source communities work even more collaboratively with the Windows Azure platform.
VM Depot wouldn’t have been possible without the support of a number of partners who have contributed images and packages for this preview launch, including Alt Linux, Basho, Bitnami and Hupstream. Here what they have to say about VM Depot:
"Ease of deployment is one of the key discussions we have with all of the companies leveraging Riak for their highly-available, scalable data storage needs. The VM Depot indicates that Microsoft Open Technologies is dedicated to supporting the needs of today's enterprise with the Windows Azure Platform" - Tyler Hannan, Director of Technical Marketing, Basho Technologies, Inc.
“The launch of Azure Virtual Images and now the VM Depot demonstrate that Microsoft is serious about building out its cloud computing platform. We are thrilled to be a part of this new marketplace, which simplifies deployment of the top open source applications to the enterprise-ready Azure platform, taking Windows Azure to a whole new level.” – Erica Brescia, CEO of BitRock, developers of Bitnami
“The demand for cloud computing is there, and Hupstream had the skills to adapt a distribution to the specifics of cloud computing, and provide support as needed. We also wanted to make Debian and Mageia more accessible, and cloud platforms are the simplest way to get started. This was also an opportunity to establish a conversation between actors that traditionally shun each other. Notably, we had excellent collaboration with Microsoft engineers and other community members, while working on a common goal: expanding the reach of developers with Linux.” – Romain d'Alverny, Managing Partner & Engineer at hupstream
I have been doing a fair amount of traveling for MS Open Tech lately where I’ve met a number of great people from the open source community. After a wonderful holiday break, we’re off to an exciting and busy New Year. I know I will use every free moment this month to peek at the VM Depot dashboard and see our latest creation take its first baby steps. Expect more in the upcoming weeks and please help us make VM Depot the best place for open source communities to work together and build shared images for the cloud. See you there.
(This blog was originally posted on our Interoperability blog)
As a proud member of the Apache Software Foundation, it’s always great to see the growth and adoption of Apache community projects. The Apache Hadoop project is a prime example. Last year I blogged about how Microsoft was engaging with this vibrant community, Microsoft, Hadoop and Big Data. Today, I’m pleased to relay the news about increased interoperability capabilities for Apache Hadoop on the Windows Server and Windows Azure platforms and an expanded Microsoft partnership with Hortonworks.
Microsoft Technical Fellow David Campbell announced today new previews of Windows Azure HDInsight Service and Microsoft HDInsight Server, the company’s Hadoop-based solutions for Windows Azure and Windows Server.
Here’s what Dave had to say in the official news about how this partnership is simplifying big data in the enterprise.
“Big Data should provide answers for business, not complexity for IT. Providing Hadoop compatibility on Windows Server and Azure dramatically lowers the barriers to setup and deployment and enables customers to pull insights from any data, any size, on-premises or in the cloud.”
Dave also outlined how the Hortonworks partnership will give customers access to an enterprise-ready distribution of Hadoop with the newly released solutions.
And here’s what Hortonworks CEO Rob Bearden said about this expanded Microsoft collaboration.
“Hortonworks is the only provider of Apache Hadoop that ensures a 100% open source platform. Our expanded partnership with Microsoft empowers customers to build and deploy on platforms that are fully compatible with Apache Hadoop.”
An interesting part of my open source community role at MS Open Tech is meeting with customers and trying to better understand their needs for interoperable solutions. Enhancing our products with new Interop capabilities helps reduce the cost and complexity of running mixed IT environments. Today’s news helps simplify deployment of Hadoop-based solutions and allows customers to use Microsoft business intelligence tools to extract insights from big data.
Today Microsoft announced the release of the TypeScript preview, a new open and interoperable language for application scale JavaScript development. The TypeScript compiler is available as open source on CodePlex.
TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript. TypeScript starts and ends in JavaScript. You can read more details in Soma’s blog, on the TypeScript site and on CodePlex.
The TypeScript language is made available under the Open Web Foundation’s OWFa 1.0 Specification Agreement, and the community is invited to discuss the language specification. Microsoft’s implementation of the compiler is also available on CodePlex under the Apache 2.0 license. There you can view the roadmap, and over the next few weeks and months you’ll see the TypeScript team continue to develop on CodePlex in the open.
TypeScript builds upon the good work happening in the TC39 committee, which determines the direction of the ECMAScript standard, the formal standard for JavaScript. Microsoft continues to work with the committee to evolve the language and runtime capabilities. Should the community desire the TypeScript team to go even further and submit TypeScript to the standards body, the team is open to that too.
All JavaScript is TypeScript, such that you can literally copy-and-paste from an existing JavaScript program into a TypeScript file. You can also create TypeScript declare files to annotate the types for existing libraries, enabling great tooling experiences without having to modify the libraries themselves (the TypeScript team has included TypeScript files to declare the types for several popular JavaScript libraries like jQuery, MongoDB, and the DOM). Over the coming weeks, we plan to partner with developer communities that create these libraries to ensure that the TypeScript files that declare the types support the best developer experience.
Because TypeScript produces standards-compliant JavaScript, TypeScript is consistent with Microsoft’s commitment to Same Markup and an interoperable web: the output of the TypeScript compiler runs on any browser, in any host, on any operating system. Further, it already plugs into your existing JavaScript toolchain (minifiers, lint checkers, build systems, command line tools).
Last but not least, you will see on the site that you can develop TypeScript code using the online playground tool or Visual Studio 2012. But this is not it! You can also use Sublime Text, Vim or eMacs as the team has kicked off work on syntax files for these popular editors JavaScript developers love to use. And as the specification is public, anyone can create their own syntax files for other editors as well.
TypeScript is one foray into making programming languages and tooling even more productive. Pick it up, take it for a spin, and give your feedback. You can contribute by discussing the language specification or filing a bug.
Olivier Bloch Senior Technical Evangelist Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.
I can hardly believe it’s been almost four months since we announced the foundation of Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. Boy, have we been busy: Redis, JQuery Mobile, OData, HTTP 2.0, Doctrine, Symfony, Apache Solr, Windows Azure tools for Mac and Linux, Eclipse, Apache Cordova, MongoDB, CouchDB, EntityFramework, ASP.net MVC 4, Web API, Web Pages, WebRTC, Wordpress… the list goes on, and the road ahead of us is nothing short of amazing. We are heading towards one of the most important years in Microsoft history and everyone in MS Open Tech is excited and busy advancing our journey into openness.
We have come to a point where we really could use some help, and I believe we have quite a few great opportunities to join our team. We are currently looking for developers, program managers, technical diplomats and evangelists: what those profiles have in common is a strong interest and experience in open technologies (Open Standards and Open Source), interoperability and community engagement. We strongly believe in code doing the talking for us: we are pragmatic, agile, focused on real-life scenarios and deeply engaged in open conversations with the community at large.
We are having tons of fun pursuing our passion for solving customer and developer issues by creating innovative solutions and technical bridges between Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies, and we want more of the same. Please visit the Microsoft careers website to learn more about the open positions and by all means do get in touch: we would love to talk to you.
As noted on the Openness@Microsoft blog this morning by Anandeep Pannu, Senior Program Manager for the Open Source Technical Center:
Today, Microsoft and partners NetApp and Citrix are excited to announce the availability of FreeBSD support for Windows Server Hyper-V. This collaboration, announced at BSDCAN 2012, will help more customers adopt virtualization and move toward cloud computing. Microsoft is committed to supporting multiple platforms with its server virtualization solution so that more organizations can take advantage of server consolidation cost-savings and build foundations for private, public and hybrid cloud computing.
This release, which includes 8,500 lines of code released under the BSD license, is the result of collaboration between Microsoft, NetApp, and Citrix to enable FreeBSD to run as a first-class guest on Windows Server Hyper-V. My colleague Peter Galli had a blog post this spring about the announcement of this goal, and it’s great to see this work come to fruition so quickly! For further background, check out the interview with Joe CaraDonna, Technical Director of Core Operating Systems at NetApp, in which he described how this project would “round out the FreeBSD virtualization story and make the FreeBSD operating system a more compelling offering.”
FreeBSD is the latest in a growing list of open-source operating systems and open-source cloud projects that work with Hyper-V, including SUSE, CentOS, Red Hat, Cs2C, OpenStack, and OpenNebula. This wide range of options makes it easier for customers to take advantage of server virtualization, enabling a variety of cloud computing and hybrid computing scenarios.
For more information about today’s announcement, see the blog post on Openness@Microsoft as well as the documentation and downloads available from the freebsdonhyper-v project on Github. The FreeBSD drivers are being prepared for inclusion in the FreeBSD core, and there will soon be available ISO images with preinstalled drivers for the latest releases of FreeBSD (based on community feedback).
Congratulations to all involved in reaching this important milestone! We’re looking forward to more good news from the FreeBSD on Hyper-V team going forward.
Doug MahughSenior Technical EvangelistMicrosoft Open Technologies, Inc.
From Jean Paoli
Since we launched Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. (MS Open Tech) as a subsidiary, project ideas have poured into our team from inside and outside the company as we shipped many open source projects and participated in many open standards activities.
After a few months of existence I want to provide you some insights on how we are functioning internally: we are working on many projects and are hiring ten full time employees: we are hiring developers, technical program managers, standards professionals and technical evangelists! We will be posting the jobs descriptions in a few weeks (and will update this blog with a link to apply).
We have also been thinking about how to scale in order to be able to work across the many projects that could be interesting to MS Open Tech, Microsoft, and to the industry as a whole.
I am pleased today to introduce the MS Open Tech Hub (the Hub):
We created the Hub as new engineering program for MS Open Tech engineers: It is a collaborative place to build open source projects, exchange and evolve open source engineering best practices, and marshal and temporarily assign resources from Microsoft to MS Open Tech (in addition to MS Open Tech full time employees) based on the needs of specific projects.
As the photograph above shows, the entire MS Open Tech team is excited and energized around the announcement of the Hub.
The number one goal of the Hub is to build, accept contributions or contribute to open source projects. Based on the needs of open source projects, engineering resources from Microsoft teams may be temporarily assigned to MS Open Tech to participate in the Hub, where they will collaborate with the community, work with the MS Open Tech full time employees and contribute to MS Open Tech projects. This collaboration will further help us exchange and evolve open source engineering best practices for open source.
The goal of the MS Open Tech Hub is to create a pool of talent where developers, testers, architects and others push boundaries, explore the toughest questions, and advance our investment in openness. The Hub brings together some of our best and brightest engineers to join together, work with the open community and toward the ultimate goal – building, accepting and contributing to interoperability, standards and open source projects.
For example, the Entity Framework team joined the MS Open Tech Hub, and brought today’s open source Entity Framework project to life. This team was able to quickly organize engineering and open development resources to be ready to start collaborating with the open source communities. EF will join the other open source components of Microsoft’s dev tools and frameworks – MVC, Web API, and Web Pages with Razor Syntax – to help increase development transparency for this project.
Get to know our team and find out what they like about collaborating in the Hub.
We’ve learned through the years that great ideas happen when smart, passionate and creative people come together in a collaborative environment that enables new ideas to flourish.
A few photos of a typical day in the MS Open Tech Hub
Jean Paoli President Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. A subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation
If you’re at OSCON 2012 this week, drop by the Microsoft booth (#601) – we’d love to see you!
We have many members of the MS Open Tech team here, as well as OSCON attendees from a variety of Microsoft teams and product groups who work with open source software. Our booth features a huge an 82 inch multi-touch PixelSense display (which is just plain fun to play around with), and you can have your picture taken by photographer Julian Cash, who is bringing his unique photographic style to our booth for the week. We’ll also have demos of some of the many OSS technologies that work well with Windows Azure and other Microsoft technologies, with experts on hand to answer all of your questions.
Last night’s Opening Reception and Camp OSCON attendee party (sponsored by Microsoft and O’Reilly) were a blast, as you can see from the photos above. Tomorrow morning, be sure to attend the plenary session in the Portland Ballroom from 9-10, where our own Gianugo Rabellino will be one of the participants, and on Friday at 11:00 in room E147, don’t miss Microsoft’s Scott Hanselman’s session on "Will Microsoft ever get serious about Open Source?"
Hope to see you at OSCON today!
UPDATED: time-lapse video of Julian Cash creating amazing photos at the booth today ...
Microsoft and The Open Group have announced the release of Open Management Infrastructure (OMI), an open source project to further the development of a production quality implementation of the DMTF CIM and WBEM standards. The Windows Management team has a blog post covering the details of OMI and the goals of the project.
OMI (formerly known as NanoWBEM) is an implementation of the DMTF Common Information Model (CIM) standard, which defines the semantics of management information for networks, applications, and services. Here’s a high-level overview of OMI’s implementation of a CIM server:
Just as the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) helped open up the x86 hardware ecosystem and enable rapid innovation across the industry, CIM-based tools such as OMI form a Datacenter Abstraction Layer (DAL) that provides a framework for interoperability between management tools across diverse platforms and devices. As noted on the Windows Server blog:
“… the growth of cloud-based computing is, by definition, driving demand for more automation, which, in turn, will require the existence of a solid foundation built upon management standards. For standards-based management to satisfy today’s cloud management demands, it must be sophisticated enough to support the diverse set of devices that are required and it must be easy to implement by hardware and platform vendors alike. The DMTF CIM and WSMAN standards are up to the task, but implementing them effectively has been a challenge. Open Management Infrastructure (OMI) addresses this problem.”
Keep an eye on The Open Group’s OMI project site for the latest news about OMI’s evolution. You can download OMI source code and documentation today (available under an Apache 2.0 open source license), and soon you’ll find information about more detailed documentation, contribution facilities, and OMI developer conferences.
Today Bill Laing, Corporate VP for Server and Cloud, announced a very important set of Windows Azure updates. With these new updates, Windows Azure is more than ever an open and easy platform to build and run applications in the cloud, and the place to be for developers who want to have choice and flexibility.
I am proud to say that Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. has been working closely with the Windows Azure team and it has been a great journey together, exploring openness and taking interoperability to a new level. There is too much news in this release to cover in a single blog post, and I strongly suggest everyone attend the Meet Windows Azure event tomorrow, when Scott Guthrie and many others will provide a lot of additional information. At the same time, I would like to spend the next few paragraphs on some of the many facets of openness in Windows Azure, to further demonstrate how Windows Azure is living in interesting and exciting times.
Services and Partnerships
For one, I have to point out how all-encompassing the Windows Azure platform is becoming. We will talk in a minute about the support for IaaS, but I would like to draw your attention to how the Windows Azure platform has now announced a set of partnerships that will provide very compelling data services such as MySQL, CouchDB, and Apache Solr.
Those services can be enjoyed by PaaS and IaaS developers and come from the leading industry experts in the field: Microsoft is partnering with leading companies such as Cleardb, Cloudant and Lucid Imagination to provide true data-as-a-service and enable developers and customers to build applications at scale without the worry of provisioning and maintaining their databases. At the same time we and our partners addressed the needs of those who prefer to run software independently in their own PaaS and/or IaaS instances, providing easy installation packages of Windows Azure-optimized versions of Apache CouchDB and Apache Solr. Last but not least, we worked with 10gen to improve the installation experience of MongoDB on Windows Azure that was originally announced in December, and we are looking forward to building a great experience for Windows Azure MongoDB users.
More importantly, both Microsoft and our partners are committed to always maintain full compatibility with the underlying Open Source applications so that our customers can always rest assured their data will work everywhere. With these technologies joining the existing pool of Windows Azure SQL Database and Apache Hadoop, Windows Azure is leading by leaps and bounds when it comes to data.
OSS on Windows Azure
If Windows Azure databases are now a few clicks away, applications are far from being out in the cold. The announcement of Windows Azure Web Sites - a hosting framework for Web apps that will work across both Windows Azure and private-cloud datacenters - unveils amazing opportunities to run popular Open Source applications in Windows Azure: be it WordPress or Drupal, Joomla or Umbraco, DotNetNuke or PHPBB, or one of the many apps in the Web Sites gallery, it has never been easier to deploy applications on the Windows Azure platform. And I can’t wait for developers to try the new releases of the Windows Azure open source SDKs (now including Python in addition to .NET, Java, PHP and Node.js) as well as the integration with Git.
We are also releasing a major update to the Windows Azure Plugin for Eclipse with Java (by Microsoft Open Technologies that includes a number of user feedback-driven improvements. Among them is a significantly revamped deployment experience contributed by GigaSpaces Technologies Ltd, an established leader in helping enterprises move their Java applications to the cloud, who has recently joined in the development work behind the plugin. Their impressive “publish to cloud” wizard makes it much easier for Windows Azure developers working with Java to deploy their projects to the Windows Azure cloud directly from Eclipse. Read the more detailed blog post from Martin Sawicki that covers the Eclipse plugin in more detail.
Last but not least, you probably have noticed the upcoming support for IaaS, Virtual Machines and Linux. I believe this move demonstrates how Windows Azure is built around what customers are asking for and with the idea of being the most inclusive platform ever. Customers are demanding high degrees of flexibility and want to be able to run every possible scenario in a seamless fashion: there are very interesting examples of hybrid private/public clouds out there, not to mention a number of creative contaminations of IaaS, PaaS and data services. We are most definitely moving away from monolithic architectures – customers and developers today want and deserve flexibility.
Linux on Windows Azure
Enabling use of Linux on Windows Azure is a key piece of the puzzle, and needs to be as easy as possible. As with data services, it’s all about strong partnerships with industry leaders: this is why you are seeing Windows Azure partnering with major Linux publishers to provide an amazing experience, and I’m sure this will be a very exciting and ongoing story. On top of that I have to note how partners like BitRock are doing very interesting work to provide more choice: two initial Linux images are available for Bitnami, and we look forward to extending the catalog much further.
Allow me to make a final example of openness and talk about the Windows Azure Command Line Tools for Mac and Linux (the ones Windows Azure users will run on local machines to deploy and manage their Windows and Linux virtual machines): not only they are Open Source, but they are available right now for Mac and Linux clients. And this is just the beginning – stay tuned for more exciting news.
Openness and Interoperability
When a journey reaches an important milestone it’s good to look back and think about the road so far: in my case I went as far as two years ago, when we shared our view on Interoperability Elements of a Cloud Platform. Back then we talked to customers and developers and came out with an overview of an open and interoperable cloud, based on four distinct elements: data portability, standards, ease of migration & deployment and developer choice. We have been laser focused on the quest for an interoperable and flexible cloud platform that would enable heterogeneous workloads, and it’s really rewarding to see how today’s announcement maps nicely to the vision that we outlined back then. More precisely:
I have broken every promise I made to myself to keep this post short, yet I barely managed to scratch the surface of this announcement. I have in front of me the plan for the upcoming weeks and I know it will be busy times for this and many other blogs in Microsoft as there is so much to share. It will all start tomorrow at the Meet Windows Azure event: be there!