As today’s mixed IT environments move to the cloud, there is increasing interest in interoperability, flexibility, and choice. Developers and IT pros want to use “best of breed” tools and techniques to design, develop, deploy and manage cloud services and applications, while protecting their existing investments in technology and training. MS Open Tech works closely with open source communities and standards organizations to help create Cloud Standards ensure that customers can use their favorite open source languages, frameworks, and tools to build on Microsoft’s cloud platforms.

MS Open Tech drives a wide range of projects to enable the use of open standards and open source on Microsoft platforms. We are engaged with various communities in the development of open cloud standards such as OData, AMQP, WS-Management, and OVF within DMTF, ISO, OASIS, W3C, and we have also worked to enable the use of many open source technologies on Windows Azure. Windows Azure is an open platform – supporting multiple protocols, standards, languages, OSS packages, development tools, server operating systems, and client devices. MS Open Tech is at the heart of this trend, working closely with the Windows Azure engineering teams to deliver customer choice as enabled by the Interoperability Elements of a Cloud Platform.

Here are some samples of our work:

Jenkins plugin for using Windows Azure Blob service
Jenkins is an open source Continuous Integration tool, with many installations and extensions, as well as strong community commitment. MS Open Tech has released an open source Jenkins plugin for using Windows Azure’s Blob Storage service as a repository of build artifacts, to allow developers to leverage the Windows Azure. Learn more…

Reactive Extensions
MS Open Tech has open sourced Reactive Extensions (Rx), a cloud programming model that allows developers to use a common interface for writing event-based applications that interact with diverse data sources, like stock quotes, Tweets, computer events, and Web service requests. Rx is an important under-the-hood component of several high-availability multi-platform applications, including Netflix and GitHub.
Rx 2.1 is available now via the Rx CodePlex project and includes support for Windows Phone 8, various bug fixes and contributions from the community. You can learn more about Rx here and source code is available on CodePlex.

ActorFx
ActorFx provides an open source, non-prescriptive, language-independent model of dynamic distributed objects for building highly available data structures and other logical entities via a standardized framework and infrastructure. ActorFx is based on the idea of the mathematical Actor Model for cloud data management. MS Open Tech has supported this work in many ways, including the recent release of ActorFx V0.40, which is available now at the CodePlex ActorFx project. The most significant new feature in our early prototype is Actor-to-Actor communication. You can learn more on ActorFx here.

Redis on Windows: MS Open Tech releases 64-bit version and Azure installer
Redis is an  open source, networked, in-memory, key-value data store. MS Open Tech has released a new 64-bit version that gives developers access to the full benefits of an extended address space, along with an easy-to-user installer for deploying Redis to Windows Azure. This was an important step in our journey toward full Windows and Windows Azure support for Redis developers. You can download it from the MS Open Tech github repository. Learn more…

VM Depot from MS Open Tech
VM Depot is a community-driven catalog of open source virtual machine images for Windows Azure, developed by MS Open Tech. On VM Depot the community can build, deploy and share their favorite Linux configurations, create custom open source stacks, and work with others to build new architectures for the cloud that leverage the openness and flexibility of the Windows Azure platform. Learn more…

Microsoft SQL Server Connector for Apache Hadoop
Hadoop is an open source framework from Apache that enables the processing of large datasets across multiple nodes. The SQL Server-Hadoop Connector is a Sqoop-based connector that facilitates efficient data transfer between SQL Server 2008 R2 and Hadoop. Sqoop supports several databases including MySQL and HDFS. This connector is bidirectional and can import and export data. Learn more here.

Windows Azure plugin for Eclipse with Java
The Windows Azure Plugin for Eclipse with Java is a free tool from MS Open Tech that provides templates and functionality to allow users to easily create, develop, test, and deploy Java-based Windows Azure applications using the Eclipse development environment. The project's source code is available under the Apache License 2.0, and you can learn more about the latest release here.

CouchDB-compatible database service (Cloudant Data Layer)
The Cloudant Data Layer provides a CouchDB-compatible database service that can be used as a highly scalable data layer for your cloud service or application running on Windows Azure. MS Open Tech has worked closely with the Cloudant team to make the Cloudant Data Layer available to Windows Azure developers. Learn more here.

Open-sourcing Entity Framework, WebPI, ASP.NET, MVC
MS Open Tech has open sourced the Entity Framework (EF), a database mapping tool useful for application development in the .NET Framework, as well as WebPI (Microsoft Web Platform Installer) and the ASP.NET and MVC application frameworks. Learn more about these projects here.

MongoDB Installer for Windows Azure
The MongoDB Installer for Windows Azure is a command-line tool (Windows PowerShell script) that automates the provisioning and deployment of MongoDB replica sets on Windows Azure virtual machines. It allows users to build a high-availability web application or service that can scale quickly in response to fluctuating demand, and to do complex queries against schema-free collections of rich objects. The installer was developed through the ongoing collaboration between MS Open Tech and 10gen. Learn more here.

Node.js on Windows Azure and Windows
Node.js is a server-side programming language for writing highly scalable Internet applications. Microsoft joined Joyent and Ryan Dahl in their effort to make Windows a supported platform for Node.JS. Our combined efforts resulted in Node.js running on Windows Azure, Windows 2008 R2, Windows 2008 and Windows 2003. Learn more here.

Symfony and Doctrine on Windows Azure
Symfony, the open source web application framework for PHP developers, and the Doctrine Project, a set of open-source libraries that help ease database development and persistence logic for PHP developers, are now both available on Windows Azure due to collaboration between MS Open Tech and members of the Symfony/Doctrine community. Learn more here.

Windows Azure command line tool for Mac and Linux
The Windows Azure command line tool for Mac and Linux, developed by MS Open Tech, allows non-Windows desktops to manage Windows Azure virtual machines running the Windows Server operating system as well as Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, CentOS, and OpenSUSE. Users can now run existing Linux payloads on Windows Azure virtual machines, and they can deploy and manage those payloads from Mac, Linux, or Windows desktops. . Learn more here.

Support for Linux virtual machines on Windows Azure
Creating a virtual machine that is running the Linux operating system is now easy when using the image gallery in the Windows Azure Management Portal. With no prior experience with Windows Azure, users on Linux, Mac, and Windows can create a virtual machine running the Linux operating system in the cloud. Learn more here.

Support for PHP development on Windows Azure
PHP, an open source programming language for web applications, is supported by Windows Azure. The Windows Azure SDK for PHP includes components that allow developers to build, deploy, and manage PHP applications for Windows Azure. MS Open Tech worked closely with the PHP community on the design and development of early versions of the PHP SDK, and you can learn more about PHP development on Windows Azure here.

Drupal, WordPress and other options in the Windows Azure web sites gallery
The websites gallery makes available a wide range of popular web applications developed by Microsoft, third party companies, and open source software initiatives. Web applications created from the gallery do not require installation of any software other than the browser used to connect to the Windows Azure Management Portal. MS Open Tech has helped make many open source options available through the Windows Azure web sets gallery. Learn more here.

Support for Linux in Microsoft System Center
Microsoft and Linux distributor SUSE announced the SUSE Manager Management Pack for System Center, allowing integration of SUSE's management platform with Microsoft. The integration between the two management systems maintains compliance in Linux server environments and keeps Linux systems patched and updated. Learn more here.