The cloud alone isn’t, and will never be, enough to sate the needs of enterprise IT. That’s why we have always stressed the importance of a hybrid approach to the cloud and sought to deliver technologies that span nearly all IT deployment scenarios, from physical infrastructure to public clouds to implementations that straddle both the datacenter and the cloud. To fully realize the promise of the open hybrid cloud, however, our leading open source technologies need to be available across the public cloud, from provider to provider, regardless of scale or business niche.

Which is why in November 2015, we entered into a partnership with Microsoft to make Red Hat’s open technologies, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, available on Microsoft Azure. Today, we’re pleased to follow up on that announcement with the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on-demand in the Azure Marketplace, pairing the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform with one of the globe’s largest public cloud platforms.

Available in all regions except China and Azure Government, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux images are certified by Red Hat and have undergone extensive testing and verification as part of our Certified Cloud and Service Provider program, of which Microsoft is a premier member. This means that customers will receive the security features and reliability that they expect from Red Hat’s flagship Linux platform delivered with the scale and flexibility of the Azure public cloud. For our integrated software vendor (ISV) partners, they can now build and deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux-certified applications for the Azure cloud, enabling more robust choice for their customers, backed by an enterprise-grade, supported open source platform.

This availability also marks the first instance of Red Hat and Microsoft’s integrated support, a unique offering in the IT world, offering a seamless experience for customers seeking to engage with industry-leading support teams to address technical challenges.

Today marks a great day for Red Hat, Microsoft and enterprise customers and ISVs - the future of IT is open, and it lives on the open hybrid cloud!

For more information, you can read the announcement on the Microsoft Azure blog. To learn more about Red Hat solutions on Microsoft Azure, please visit https://www.redhat.com/en/partners/strategic-alliance/microsoft.

The use of the word "partnership" does not mean a legal partnership or any other form of legal relationship between Microsoft and Red Hat, Inc.