Windows Azure and CentOS: How the OpenLogic Expert Community Works

Yesterday we had the pleasure of attending the “Meet Windows Azure” launch party, along with a number of other Azure partners in San Francisco.   

I was struck by the number of partners present and by the breadth of the overall announcement.

I also lost count how often I heard “Linux” and “Open Source.”

Linux and open source are essential to success for all cloud platform vendors, including Azure. Our partnership, providing CentOS support on Windows Azure, is one of the key partnerships announced this week. Microsoft's enterprise customers are using CentOS and have expressed interest in a supported offering in the cloud.  

This is a perfect fit with OpenLogic’s community OSS support model.

We received a lot of questions at the event and online about how our CentOS support would work on Azure.  Perhaps the most common questions centered around details of the relationship between Microsoft and CentOS, Microsoft and OpenLogic and OpenLogic and CentOS.

From an OpenLogic perspective, it’s probably easiest to explain our relationship with CentOS in the same way we work with 650+ other open source projects and communities. The communities that work so hard to produce the great products we help our enterprise customers use.

OpenLogic provides SLA support through a combination of our internal support team and our unique developer crowd sourced program called the OpenLogic Expert Community launched a few years ago. The OpenLogic Expert Community is mostly made up of external software developers who develop open source and are committed to it's success. We pay these developers to solve problems encountered by enterprise software developers. In addition, OpenLogic donates a matching contribution to the non-profit open source software groups.

The vast majority of support we provide our enterprise customers revolves around questions of proper use, integration, configuration, dependencies and overall, “I can’t get project X to do Y in my application, can you help me figure it out?”   Our internal resources and the Expert Community are great at providing this type of front-line assistance.

Sometimes, our enterprise customers find something such as a bug that requires new code submissions. When this happens, OpenLogic hires the community contributors and committers who use the project’s standard method of evaluating and accepting/denying code changes.    The OSS communities are independent not only from OpenLogic and other commercial vendors, but from each other as well. 

While we are in preview period with CentOS on Windows Azure, we anticipate our Expert Community model working the very same way.

 

You can view the live "Meet Windows Azure" event here.

 

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