Driven by customer demand, Pivotal and Microsoft are working together to help enterprise customers realize their digital transformation goals. We’ve delivered a fully self-service Pivotal Cloud Foundry in Azure to give customers the ability to run cloud-native Java and .NET applications on Microsoft’s global public cloud infrastructure.
“For us, enterprises are not an afterthought, they’re our design point.”
Scott Guthrie – Executive Vice President, Cloud and Enterprise, Microsoft
Microsoft Azure provides an ideal enterprise cloud, building on Microsoft’s heritage of datacenter software, developer tools and, more recently, cloud services such as Office 365 and Bing. If you’re a Microsoft customer, you have significant investments in on-premises software and are likely taking a close look at how to extend your footprint to Azure.
Joint customers such as GE, Ford, Dell, and Manulife are already realizing the benefits of deploying cloud-native applications to Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Microsoft Azure infrastructure and services.
Many of these customers aren’t just looking for another place to run their applications but for a different way to build their applications. Pivotal and Microsoft offer a solution to help these customers transform into software-driven enterprises. Microsoft and several of our customers have also shown their commitment to this vision by investing in Pivotal.
Here are just a few reasons why customers are so excited about Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Microsoft Azure:
1. Built For Business
Pivotal’s close collaboration with Microsoft goes way beyond simply making Cloud Foundry available in Azure’s global marketplace. Together we’ve delivered an end to end, enterprise-class cloud-native platform experience. We’ve built Azure specific integrations, as well as invested in full support of Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Service Brokers and the BOSH CPI through Microsoft’s global support teams working with Pivotal’s experts. Whenever you need help, you quickly get experts on-hand, whether they’re at Pivotal or Microsoft.
Many enterprise customers are hungry to transform their businesses through software, but struggling to find the right partners to make such a big bet. If you’re looking for partners that can teach you how to build cloud software the Silicon Valley way but also understand the needs of enterprise, Microsoft and Pivotal are a great choice.
“As enterprise customers are looking to the cloud to transform their businesses, they are increasingly turning to Microsoft Azure as the enterprise-ready cloud platform that supports customer choice. Many of these customers are also choosing the combination of Pivotal’s deep expertise in agile development and ops and the open source Cloud Foundry platform, coupled with Azure’s enterprise credibility and global reach, to give them competitive advantage.”
Corey Sanders, Partner Director of Program Management, Microsoft Azure
2. Simple to Deploy
Azure’s support for the Pivotal Cloud Foundry Ops Manager tool streamlines the process of building and running Pivotal Cloud Foundry environments. Ops Manager also offers deployment ‘tiles’ for quickly deploying and upgrading popular services onto Cloud Foundry, including Redis, RabbitMQ, GemFire and other 3rd party services. In place of manual assembly with the risk of human error, Ops Manager gives you a repeatable, predictable tool for constructing highly available systems.
Caption : Operations Manager running on Microsoft Azure
3. Cloud-Native, On-Demand, Wherever You Need It
When used as the infrastructure beneath Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Microsoft Azure offers excellent geographic and hybrid flexibility to meet your needs when deploying and operating cloud-native applications. Microsoft Azure claims more datacenter regions worldwide than any other cloud vendor, including support for 34 regions in 8 different countries, allowing you to plan for business continuity and disaster recovery while maintaining compliance with data sovereignty and security requirements.
4. Java, check. .NET, check.
With Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Microsoft Azure adds an open source microservices platform for enterprise developers to build and run applications in Java, .NET, Node.js, and other popular frameworks. For Java developers, Pivotal is the main contributor to the Java Spring Boot project, the most popular microservices developer technology, with over 8.8 million downloads per month. Naturally, Spring and Spring Boot run seamlessly on Pivotal Cloud Foundry—but .NET developers are also well catered for as SteelToe provides them with painless microservice patterns. In reality, many enterprises today have both Java and .NET development efforts and the good news is that a single Cloud Foundry environment can support both, enabling consolidation of development process and operations around a single platform.
5. Add Azure Superpowers To Your App
The service broker for Azure makes many of Azure’s powerful, enterprise-grade services available to developers through Cloud Foundry, including:
- SQLDatabase : A managed cloud database for app developers
- Blob Storage : Massively-scalable object storage for unstructured data
- Redis Cache : High throughput, consistent low-latency data access
- DocumentDB : Blazing fast, planet-scale NoSQL
- ServiceBus : Reliable cloud messaging as a service (MaaS) and simple hybrid integration
The Cloud Foundry service broker helps developers connect their applications with other services—it’s a hugely popular pattern and one that other open source projects are looking to adopt. Service Brokers help developers get the best out of the underlying cloud services. They give developers access to the range of underlying cloud services, but through a consistent interface. For more on services brokers and how they work, check out the documentation.
6. Compliance Without The Grind
When it comes to compliance, Microsoft’s already done a lot of the heavy lifting for you at the infrastructure level, with the broadest set of certifications of any cloud provider:
Building on this foundation, Michael Cote explains how building on a cloud native platform helps ensure compliance in your applications to match those in the underlying cloud infrastructure:
When we standardize on a cloud platform, like Pivotal Cloud Foundry™, and then get our auditors to trust it, we can dramatically reduce compliance bottlenecks. One of the US federal agencies taking this approach has shown that you can fold compliance wait-times down from about a year to just two or three days.
Get Started With Pivotal Cloud Foundry On Azure Today
Learn more about the benefits of running Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Azure
Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Azure.com
A trial of PCF for Azure is available now; visit http://network.pivotal.io to obtain a full production version of PCF 1.8, the latest release.
Also check out Gil Isaac’s SpringOne video: “Keep calm and CF push on Azure”
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