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Don't be shy, we know you've got .NET code. Why not run it on our Linux cloud – Red Hat

Two can play that game, Pivotal

Red Hat plans to welcome Microsoft Windows .NET workloads onto its on-premises app-hosting cloud OpenShift Origin – as it attempts to close the gap between its technology and Pivotal's Cloud Foundry.

The upgrade was announced on Wednesday by Red Hat, which will work with Uhuru Software to bring .NET and SQL Server support to its Linux-powered OpenShift technology.

"Almost every enterprise customer has some amount of .NET in their environment," a Red Hat spokesperson explained to us via email.

OpenShift Origin is an open-source platform-as-a-service beast whose development is led by Red Hat. The software provides developers with a runtime environment for applications while handling configuration and infrastructure management.

The tech is extensible via Cartridges, which let developers add in support for web frameworks, databases, monitoring services, connectors, or external backends. SQL Server support will be added via one of these Cartridges, the company said.

OpenShift's main competitor is Pivotal's Cloud Foundry technology (which has both commercial and open-source variants), which has supported a .NET capability for several years via Tier 3's Iron Foundry project. Like OpenShift, Cloud Foundry is extendible via Buildpacks, which are functionally similar to Cartridges.

Red Hat's decision to pour resources into getting a rival technology, Microsoft's .NET in this case, humming on its cloud follows similar moves by other companies: bitter enemies Microsoft and Oracle, for instance, have teamed up to run their respective software on each other's cloud.

"This new .NET on OpenShift solution will enable DevOps to provide a standardized application environment with consistent administration capabilities across both by abstracting away the underlying infrastructure," Chris Morgan, technical director of Red Hat's OpenShift Partner Ecosystem, wrote in a blog post describing the move. "This means developers can easily write an application using a .NET frontend that is on Windows with a MySQL backend on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, all through the OpenShift self-service interface."

Uhuru says it has "worked closely with Red Hat engineers to build comprehensive OpenShift integration for the Microsoft application stack."

The majority of Uhuru's implementation is written in C#, the company said. The biz also claims it has built in "extensive application isolation," which should let the Windows nodes work securely in a multi-tenant manner.

Red Hat was not able to provide a timeline by which Uhuru's software would be merged into OpenShift Origin. "We collaborate with numerous partners and open source communities and don't put a timeframe or limits on that collaboration," a spokesperson told us via email.

Red Hat's new software alliance follows EMC, IBM, HP, Rackspace, SAP, and VMware joining a foundation to spur development of Cloud Foundry. ®

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