Red Hat and Microsoft just made a game-changing announcement. Having personally worked with Linux since the early nineties, this is a time that seemed inconceivable at any point. In fact, a little over 18 months ago, we started adding Microsoft .NET capabilities to OpenShift Origin, and received a lot of interest from community members, customers and partners for a commercially available solution around this effort. We were never able to natively pull everything together to provide the support and enterprise quality that customers require from Red Hat – until now.

Before diving into what the ecosystem of partners and customers can expect to see in the coming months, let's recap how we got to this point. Since last year's blog about adding .NET to Origin, a lot has happened in the container and Windows space:

microsoft-linux

Source:  “Microsoft Loves Linux,” Microsoft Windows Server Team, 6 May 2015

Red Hat has always embraced innovation via open source– it’s simply what we do. In fact, with the launch of OpenShift Enterprise 3, Red Hat is getting back to where Red Hat excels – taking best-of-breed open source technologies with the most vibrant and active communities and bringing them to the enterprise. What is more powerful in technology than the power of open source? In hindsight, the announcement today is a powerful combination of community and partnership that is further proof that open source is not only mainstream, but it is the foundation of current and future IT innovation.

Though there is still work to be done to complete full integration, having a solution where OpenShift will be providing a .NET runtime distributed and supported by Red Hat and Microsoft is a huge win for customers. OpenShift will be able to natively provide the Microsoft .NET framework running on a Red Hat supported operating system – let that sink in for a moment. There is no need to create a “bolt-on” solution or get around multi-tenancy and container challenges as we originally faced with our integration attempt back in 2014 – indeed, this announcement is the first step in a journey with the goal of enabling OpenShift to run enterprise applications for just about any framework on the planet in a consistent and reliable manner.

So is the .NET addition real? You bet it is! Check out this video running OpenShift Enterprise 3 and a .NET application based on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux container:

This is just the first step in an exciting and revolutionary journey where the OpenShift ecosystem is the clear winner. Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks as we will continue to share updates on our progress via blogs and through OpenShift Commons.