Microsoft 💘 Open Source - Azure Makes it Easy to Run Open-Source Products

In our previous blog post, we’ve gone through the history of Microsoft in open-source as part of the Microsoft 💘 Open Source blog post series:

• Microsoft’s journey to open source (link)
• Azure makes it easy to run open-source products (this post)
• Microsoft makes it easier to build scalable platforms
• Giving back to open source

Today, we will talk about how Microsoft Azure makes it a lot simpler to run open-source products.

Running open-source products on Azure

Open-source technologies are great since they do not tie you directly to a single company, tend to give you more flexibility in how you can run it, and allow you to contribute back to make the product better.

You can very easily take an open-source product and run it yourself (if the license allows it)! I’ve seen a variety of customers doing that by using Azure VMs, for example, because the technology is free and it’s easy to get started!

However, getting started is only the beginning, and using this approach typically comes with some concerns:

• Do you want to be in charge of keeping it up and running?
• In case of issues, who will you contact?
• How will you deploy, operate and scale it?
• What if you have a regional outage? Do you have all the knowledge to set up high availability and disaster recovery?

Make sure that your company has all these things covered, or use a managed offering from Azure!

There’s a range of open-source products that are offered by Azure as a product that allows you to rely on that open source technologies but have to worry about less.

For example, you can use Azure Event Hubs for Kafka which allows you to do data streaming with Kafka without having to worry about running Kafka clusters. Another good example is Azure Cosmos DB that allows you to use MongoDB, Cassandra, and Gremlin with planet-scale performance. Need disaster recovery? Just enable replication and use multi-master writes!

Next to that, Azure is partnering with companies such as Elastic and Confluent to bring their offerings into Azure so that you can simply install it in your subscription and you can deploy their products in your subscription.

Here is an overview of well-known open source products and various ways to run them on Microsoft Azure, without having to worry about managing them:

Azure partners with open-source products & vendors

Those who follow the open-source space might have seen the news about Elastic changing their licensing model due to companies such as AWS, and it is not the first company to do this.

That’s why it’s important to collaborate, contribute and make open-source a sustainable ecosystem, rather than just bluntly using technologies and not giving back.

Instead, Microsoft Azure partners with companies such as Elastic to bring their technology to their customers with Elastic on Azure! (azure blog | Elastic blog)

This is a more sustainable way of working and makes sure that Elastic can maintain their open-source technologies, while Azure customers have a simpler way to run it.

Thanks for reading,

Tom.