Our mission here at OpenLogic is to promote healthy open source growth and adoption in enterprises, and it is very important to us for these endeavors to respect the open source communities. It has been about a year since we started collaborating with Microsoft to provide the CentOS image for Windows Azure. During that time, there have been the expected conversations concerning Microsoft and its relationship with open source. In a previous article, Microsoft Embracing Openness with Windows Azure, I shared my thoughts about how the Windows Azure teams were embracing open source.  Now, let's look at how things stand since Windows Azure has reached General Availability.¹

To coincide with Microsoft’s recent announcement of the general availability of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services ¹, OpenLogic provides certified and supported CentOS Images on the Windows Azure Platform through an ecosystem of partners.  

One year ago, I wrote about how creating applications for the cloud presented new opportunities in dev-ops management. OpenLogic's just-released product was built from the ground up to run in the cloud. We designed the application to allow for largely zero-downtime deployments, and constructed our deployment strategy to build everything we needed from scratch, if necessary, and swap the running servers on the fly. This process worked extremely well for us. We could spin up new app servers in minutes, and the process gave us the flexibility to start from scratch or from intermediate saved baselines to improve the deployment times when possible. Coupled with a Kanban-style continuous release process, we deployed new features quickly, confidently, and safely. This was a long way from where we started over ten years ago when we delivered CDs and DVDs every 6 months.

Microsoft continues to be a lightning rod for controversy in the open source communities. A quick Google search (microsoft open source) shows the breadth of opinions on Microsoft's open source involvement.