Microsoft and Red Hat announced they will bring official support to .NET runtime on Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux. According to the two companies, “Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be the primary development and reference operating system for .NET Core on Linux”.
According to Harry Mower, Red Hat’s head of developer experience, open sourcing .Net has made possible new possibilities for developers to “merge the benefits of the OS and the runtime”. Particularly, Linux may provide great scaling opportunities at a fraction of the cost of Windows. One case where Mower sees a clear advantage for developers from using .NET on Linux is the possibility of packaging and deploying .NET applications using Docker containers and the rich ecosystem of tools that are available. A key factor for this to be viable for the enterprise, though, is the availability of official support at all levels. The new agreement aims to solve precisely that by making it possible for enterprise developers to run .NET on Red Hat and have the same level of support that they expect when building their app on Windows, the two companies claim.
The announcement is part of a larger partnership aimed to improve integration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Microsoft Azure which additionally includes the availability of native Red Hat solutions for Azure customers, integrated support from co-located support teams, and support for Azure workload management from Red Hat Cloud Forms.
.Net Core was open sourced at the end of 2014 and it can run on Linux. Mac OS X, and FreeBSD. Open sourcing .NET met a lot of interest within the developers' community, and as early as one month after .NET was open sourced, it was reported that the “number of external developers working on the project now exceeds the number of internal developers”.