Microsoft’s Memo Isn’t News, But Its Plan to Work With Google Certainly Is

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Microsoft

All eyes were on the carefully designed—and carefully publicized—corporate memo from new CEO Satya Nadella. But that same morning, Microsoft released a far better illustration of the way Nadella has so significantly changed the way it operates.

At first blush, it doesn’t seem like much—one of those tech world announcements filled with arcane references to things like virtual machine clusters and open source contributions. But the announcement shows that, as Microsoft seeks to remake itself in a new world dominated by mobile devices and cloud computing services, the company is striving to ensure that it can work hand-in-hand with competing companies and technologies—at least in some cases. For a corporate giant that for so long insisted on doing things only in its own way—actively shunning popular software and services built outside the company—this is a major change in attitude. And it’s just what Microsoft needs.

The news—which arrived early Thursday morning, at the same moment as Nadella’s memo—was that Microsoft was putting its weight behind Kubernetes, a new tool that seeks to improve the convenience and efficiency of cloud computing services. This is significant not only because Kubernetes was created by Google—Microsoft’s biggest rival—but because it’s an open source software tool that only works with the open source Linux operating system, traditionally held up as the bête noire of Microsoft’s Windows OS. This shows that, as Nadella says, Microsoft sees its future in cloud computing and that the company fully realizes its success in this burgeoning area depends on dovetailing with the greater community of cloud companies and software projects—not just working against them.

“The way to look at it is: we want developers to be happy on the Azure platform,” Microsoft Azure Corporate Vice President Jason Zander tells WIRED. “Whatever type of workload or operating system or programming language they want to use, we want to make sure we can do a first class job for them.”

Microsoft took a major step in this direction about two years ago when it unveiled a new version of its Azure cloud computing service that could run not only Windows but Linux. Like Google’s Compute Engine or Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud or Rackspace’s Cloud Servers, Azure lets companies rent huge numbers of virtual servers where they can build and run their own websites and other software, and these companies now have the choice of loading Azure’s virtual machines with the open source operating system that has become a standard means of erecting online software. It’s still unclear how many companies are using Linux atop Azure. Zander declines to provide specific numbers. But he says “a lot of folks” are doing so, and the tech giant’s support for Kubernetes shows that it’s actively working to provide the tools companies need to take full advantage of the open source OS.

This is significant not only because Kubernetes was created by Google—Microsoft’s biggest rival—but because it only works with the open source Linux operating system, traditionally held up as the bête noire of Microsoft’s Windows OS.

Kubernetes is a way of juggling what are known as Docker containers. You can think of these as shipping containers for software. They let companies easily move software from machine to machine and from cloud service to cloud service, and when used in tandem with a tool such as Kubernetes, they can help improve the efficiency of software that runs across a wide array of machines. Many cloud computing providers are now embracing the Docker technology, seeing it as the next big thing in online computing infrastructure. Red Hat and IBM, for instance, are also backing Kubernetes. But Red Hat and IBM aren’t Microsoft.

What’s particularly interesting in the case of Nadella and company is that Docker containers only work with Linux. In fact, there’s not even a true equivalent to the technology on the standard version of Windows. “This would apply purely to Linux workloads,” says Craig Mcluckie, a product manager for Google’s cloud services. Nonetheless, Microsoft is working to ensure that Kubernetes can operate in tandem with Azure, and Zander says it will likely contribute code to the open source project that shares the Kubernetes software with the world at large. It may seem that, in doing so, Microsoft is undercutting its own operating system, but Microsoft’s future—and indeed, the future of the industry—is much greater than Windows.

The future is cloud computing, a world where businesses can run applications across not only on servers in their own data centers but across virtual machines served up by not one but many different services, from Azure to Google Compute Engine to Amazon EC2. As Google’s Mcluckie says, technologies such as Kubernetes and Docker can make all that happen, calling them a gateway to “multi-cloud environments,” and Microsoft agrees.

But at the same time, Microsoft has been running something similar to these technologies across the thousands of Windows machines that drive its own online infrastructure, Zander will tell you, and much like Kubernetes and Docker, these technologies will eventually trickle down to the rest of the world. “We have technologies that do absolutely work that way,” he says. “It’s the substrate of Azure.” In other words, Microsoft is both building its own technologies and working alongside technologies from others. And that is what breeds success in the modern age of computing.