Microsoft announced on Wednesday that it has entered a partnership with Red Hat to include Red Hat solutions on Microsoft Azure. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is to be offered as the preferred choice for enterprise Linux workloads.

The two companies are also working together to address enterprise, ISV and developer needs for building, deploying, and managing applications on Red Hat software across private and public clouds.

Azure will soon become a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider so customers can run their Red Hat Enterprise Linux applications and workloads on it. Red Hat Cloud Access subscribers will be able to bring their own virtual machine images to run in Azure. Azure customers will be able to utilize Red Hat’s application platform, including Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat JBoss Web Server, Red Hat Gluster Storage, and OpenShift.

Customers will also get the benefit of cross-platform support with both companies offering support in an integrated way. According to Microsoft, this is unlike any previous partnership in the public cloud. Support teams will actually reside on the same premises.

“Red Hat CloudForms will interoperate with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, offering Red Hat CloudForms customers the ability to manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux on both Hyper-V and Microsoft Azure,” Microsoft says. “Support for managing Azure workloads from Red Hat CloudForms is expected to be added in the next few months, extending the existing System Center capabilities for managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

“Expanding on the preview of .NET on Linux announced by Microsoft in April, developers will have access to .NET technologies across Red Hat offerings, including Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, jointly backed by Microsoft and Red Hat,” it adds. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be the primary development and reference operating system for .NET Core on Linux.”

Red Hat discusses the partnership more in a blog post, as does Microsoft. They’ll be hosting a webcast later on Wednesday to discuss it further.

Image via Red Hat